This is a strange time in one’s academic career I suppose. With the PhD just handed in, pending final approval by my university’s committee, I am beginning to think seriously about where and what to publish. Below some initial thoughts that will hopefully guide me in my next steps. Continue reading
This is where I think in public — about urbanism, political economy, and often just the view from wherever I happen to be standing. New here? The reading guides below are the best way in. Otherwise, scroll down for the latest blog posts.
Latest posts
Hiatus
Fatherhood and the final stretches of my PhD have taken a toll on my posting performance here. Hard to believe it’s been more than half a year since the last blog post. Long gone seem the days when my aim was to have two entries up each week. I do intend to continue writing here, especially to get some structure into my post-PhD thinking as well as reflect on my teaching. A few updates and ideas after the jump.
Metropolitan Tokyo: context
Several classes at the beginning of the Metropolitan Tokyo course I teach at TUJ are dedicated to establishing a context for analyzing the Japanese capital. I comment on these lectures after the jump.

Metropolitan Tokyo: intro lecture
This is the first post in a series of summaries of and notes on my lectures for “Metropolitan Tokyo”, a class that I teach at Temple University Japan. I have written more about it here.

Metropolitan Tokyo
I have been teaching at Temple University’s Japan campus for more than a year now and still haven’t written anything on this blog here to reflect on this amazing experience. This shall now change with some thoughts on the most recent course I teach called “Metropolitan Tokyo”.
TUJ’s Azabu Campus
January update
This blog has been silent for over a month (for a variety of very good reasons), and before substantial posting resumes very shortly, herewith just a few notes for my records.

Shinjuku 24 December 2017
City size and inequality
Comparisons across cities are notoriously hard. For one, data availability is a huge problem given our methodological bias on the nation state. But there is also the problem on how we delineate municipalities. Nonetheless, I found this graph on city size and inequality very interesting.

Click here for original
Income inequality Tokyo 2013
I wanted to share and briefly discuss a great graph on income inequalities in Tokyo and Osaka that I found. It has been compiled by the NLI Research Institute and shows interesting variations across the 23 wards.
Click for original Continue reading
Reviving a book project
One of the first ideas to come out of writing this blog was to edit a book about Tokyo’s postwar architecture. It’s been several years since and I am wondering how I would go about a book on this or a similar topic now, almost five years later.



