I wrote a lengthy annotated bibliography for Oxford University Press’s Urban Studies series, for which I got commissioned last year and which kept me busy for an extended period of time. This 20-page document was much more fun to prepare than I thought.

It felt a little bit like writing an ode to the city I have come to know the best of all places I have ever lived in. This is because I spent several years researching its past as my full time occupation of course, but also because getting to know it required me to shed all preconceptions of how to perceive space.

My Japanese language skills were never good enough to approach Tokyo through primary literature, so this bibliography lists English works only. It is by no means exhaustive but the 100+ sources cover a lot of different aspects of the city’s history and current issues.

Jordan Sand offered generous help in identifying new sources and trimming the narrative. I hope it flows well enough to also offer something beyond the specific research query people might use this list for and discover something new.

The full text is behind the OUP paywall, but I hear many academic institutions have access to it. If not, please get in touch.

The thematic chapters are:

• Introduction
• General Historical Overviews for Edo/Tokyo
• 1603–1867: Edo Period
• The Scepter of Destruction
• Economic History
• Political and Social History
• Contested Spaces
• Tokyo as a World, Global, and Neoliberal City
• History of Urban Planning
• Tokyo Urban Form
• Architecture
• Metabolism
• From Urban Tropes to Urban Theory
• Housing
• Placemaking and Heritage
• Iconic Districts
• Tokyo Neighborhoods
• Transportation
• Gender and Sexuality
• Tokyo Imagined

An article drawing on one of my PhD dissertation’s core chapters has just been published by Cities, an urban studies journal. In summary:

• This paper zooms in on one of the most remarkable case studies of urban growth, i.e. that of Tokyo during the postwar period 1955-1975. Despite the city’s rapid transformation at the heart of the Japanese economic miracle, it became more egalitarian instead of stratifying spatially.
• Charting this process for Tokyo’s 23 central wards, this paper analyzes inequalities between these administrative subunits over a 20-year period focusing on living space per capita, urban form and business densities.
• Besides a homogenization in living standards, the 23-ward area under review here also became more equal in terms of its urban form, while neighborhoods retained their traditional character with a high density of bathhouses, small retailers and construction establishments.
• Tokyo’s non-Western urbanism and recent experience of rapid megacity growth make it more relevant to contemporary developing cities and help historicize the discourse of rapidly growing, large cities.