Deepening the City-Region Gap in 21st Century Japan: Smart Cities as a Tool to Achieve Administrative Neoliberalism

In the last three decades, administrative reforms in Japan have reshaped the relations between central and local governments. With the beginning of the structural reforms in the late 1990s and the neoliberal reforms of the Koizumi cabinet, jichitai have been pushed to become more autonomous vis-à-vis Tokyo. Against the backdrop of growing concern with climate change and energy production and supply, several local administrations have initiated plans to make their cities "smart" or "environmentally friendly" in line with a series of central government's guidelines. In this context, smart cities have emerged as strategic policy tools. On the one hand, they have contributed first to the implementation of long-term administrative reforms and second, to the reproduction and diffusion of neoliberal solution-oriented and technology-driven ideas of cities and communities, in both urban and rural contexts. In light of these facts, this chapter surveys smart city projects in Japan employing Kanemoto and Tokuoka's Urban Employment Area model to highlight persisting inequalities and imbalances between urban areas and regions. In doing this, this chapter offers a multi-level perspective on the decentralisation process clarifying the role of multiple actors involved in a complex sociotechnical network.