Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects
Jordan Sand
Abstract
Tokyo Vernacular examines how the megacity Tokyo acquired a historical identity in the late twentieth century. Through political activism in public squares, community movements, local history, urban exploration, found art, and museum exhibits of commonplace objects and scenes, Tokyo Vernacular traces a trajectory of citizen involvement in the reimagining of the capital city from the monumental embodiment of national subjectivity to the site of everyday life. In contrast to the prevalent critical reading of postmodern historicism as a form of commodified nostalgia, the book identifies the uses ... More
Keywords: vernacular architecture, urban space, memory, preservation, postmodernism, nostalgia, everyday life, local identity, postwar Japan, Tokyo, Edo, Shitamachi, right to the city, economic bubble, uses of the past, property, commons
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520275669 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: September 2014 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520275669.001.0001 |
