Housing Policies and the (Re-)Shaping of the Inner-City: The Case of Osaka City’s Nishinari Ward

Abstract

During the 2000s, public assistance in Japan underwent some crucial changes, making housing benefits available to homeless and needy people. The resulting increase of public assistance recipients in Japan’s major cities exhibited a particular spatial pattern characterized by strong concentrations in inner-city areas. This chapter investigates this pattern by tracing back the development of policies concerned with housing issues in Nishinari Ward, Osaka’s notorious inner-city. Nishinari Ward serves as an example in case as it is home to Japan’s largest day laborer district and an area of burakumin, descents of Edo period outcasts, which are both typical features of inner cities in Japan. The analysis shows that the inner-city was shaped and reshaped by housing policies in three distinctive phases. While in the first phase (from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1950s) policies contributed mainly through their exclusionary character to the development of the inner-city, in the second phase (from the mid-1950s to the early 1990s) direct government interventions in response to social movements and day laborer riots were prevailing. In the third phase (from the late-1990s to the present), these direct government interventions were gradually residualized, and local communities, civil organizations such as NPOs, and the market have been increasingly mobilized for welfare provision, becoming crucial factors shaping the inner-city.