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This paper aims to focus on citizen participation as a crucial place management factor in Tokyo’s shrinking suburbs as a way to facilitate the goal of retaining and attracting population and improving townscape quality. This research qualitatively examines participatory practices in place management and place branding strategies in one case study.

A historical overview of participatory place management in Japan introduces the case study of Kunitachi City, in the western periphery of Tokyo, chosen because of its peculiar development tied to bottom-up practices, high-quality built environment and strong identity. Analysis was carried out by means of literature review in Japanese and English, interviews and extensive fieldwork between 2015 and 2017.

A certain degree of conflict between progressive and reactionary participatory practices can be beneficial to place management, and local governments should seek ways to actively support and grant legal status to civic involvement. Moreover, high-quality unique built space, achieved through participatory actions, is a prime tool to brand peripheral areas and foster the pride of residents.

In a context where municipalities need to devolve more and more responsibilities to their inhabitants, Kunitachi has emerged as a best practice thanks to a high degree of civic capital. While there is no ready-made recipe to be replicated, other areas should closely examine the efforts by this municipality to sustain bottom-up involvement, yielding the benefits of an attractive city image created by its own residents.

Many small- and medium-sized Japanese cities are located along the coast and have become vulnerable to both coastal and mountain hazards. The vulnerability is increased by a rapidly growing aging population, low resources, and lack of capacity in the local governments. In this scenario, it is important that the community's potential should be fully utilized through proper awareness raising and capacity building. Town watching is considered as a useful tool to reduce urban risk in small- and medium-sized cities, where local students, teachers, parents, resident associations, and local government members collectively watch both good and bad (vulnerable) parts of their city. This collective watching and participatory mapping enhance the engagement of school children and communities in risk reduction activities. Town watching is considered as a process and it is important to continue the initiative for effective risk reduction at the community level.

The earthquake and tsunami that struck eastern Japan on March 11, 2011, not only caused extensive direct damage to the population but also triggered a nuclear power plant accident that brought the terror and reality of radiation. The restoration of communities in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima Prefectures presents enormous problems. People from the radiation-contaminated areas have faced numerous ordeals since resettlement after the accident. Through personal interviews with victims, this chapter investigates what happened in the regional societies and how community consciousness changed as a result of the combined natural and manmade catastrophes. The study focuses on the restoration of community from social bonds through mutual help networks as a spontaneous social order. As the result of interviewing, some propositions were developed concerning the transformation of mutual help networks. The stronger the outside assistance from volunteers whom the victims came to trust and rely on, the weaker inside communal help becomes. Inventorying and clarifying the particular problems of conflict in stricken communities such as the loss of confidence in neighbors, the possibilities of rebuilding communities are explored, especially indicating how to cope with the social demise of communities that local people had formed and occupied all their lives.

This paper aims to review multiple historical perspectives on urban regeneration interventions while also serving as a prologue to and the rationale for a Special Issue of the Journal of Place Management and Development (JPMD) on Placemaking and Sustainable Urban Regeneration in Japan.

The paper reviews the literature on city center regeneration, with particular attention to the USA and the UK contexts. The emphasis is on comparing and contrasting what have become known as the North American and European regeneration models. This background is helpful to place the Special Issue in a broad international context.

The key finding is that the history of planning city centers appears to be largely a response to urbanization and the problems it has brought forward. The papers in this JPMD’s Special Issue exemplify this finding with cases from Toyama, Kanazawa and Tokyo.

Cities are transformed as their centers grow and develop. City centers represent important anchor points in every community. However, evolving functional decentralization has occurred mostly due to changes in flows of capital, people, materials and other socio-economic transformations. The review shows how urban regeneration programs tend to be implemented to correct and or improve physical, socio-economic and environmental problems associated with functional and programmatic decentralization.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of place-making on the quality of place through community-organised art festivals, with two case studies in urban informal settlements or kampungs in Indonesia.

Findings presented here are based on data collected and 39 in-depth interviews conducted in 2017 in two kampungs, namely, Kampung Dago Pojok, Bandung and Kampung Bustaman, Semarang.

This paper argues that place-making can happen through temporary practices, such as festivals, and improve the quality of place in informal settlements. It indicates and analyses the kinds of activities that increase the aesthetic value of spaces and build a positive image of the kampungs. The study concludes with the finding that place-making through temporary interventions has the potential to permanently change and reshape public space. At the core of these activities is the collective and voluntary work known as kerja bakti that is done by the kampung communities and the civil society organizations involved.

The paper offers a fresh perspective in the context of understanding the implications of place-making in the Global South. Assessing the development of public space, the paper provides insights into the use of grassroots festivals as a tool to permanently reshape urban spaces and engage the local community throughout the process.

Community currency (CC) is used as a tool for reviving local communities by promoting economic growth and facilitating the formation of social capital. Although the Japanese CC movement has stagnated since mid-2005, a new experiment, Fukkou Ouen Chiiki Tsuka (CC for supporting disaster recovery), was introduced across disaster-damaged areas after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Previous studies assessing the role of CC in these earthquake-damaged areas are rare; the purpose of this paper is to examine the micro processes of community rebuilding that underlie the transactional networks mediated by one of the experiments, Domo, in Kamaishi.

Using transactional records capturing residents’ CC activities during the five-month pilot period before actual implementation of Domo simultaneous investigation for empirical network analysis techniques identify the network configuration dynamics representing the multiple observed forms of social capital in this disaster-affected local community.

This study of the five-month pilot for the Domo system revealed: intensive dependence on the coordinating role of core members (i.e. the creation of weak ties), a lack of balanced support among members and the resulting uni-directional transactions (i.e. the avoidance of generalized exchanges), and the reinforcement of previous transactional ties via reciprocation or transitive triads (i.e. the formation of strong ties).

This study provides guidance for practitioners, researchers, and policy makers on how community residents’ engagement in CC activities could function as a potential tool for generating positive socio-economic effects for local communities in disaster areas.

Drawing on a case study in Hitachi City, Ibaraki prefecture, this chapter aims to analyze the relationship between community support and the behavior of residents after the Tohoku Pacific Earthquake in the regions affected by the disaster. The chapter will examine residents’ behavior and the community’s roles by way of the following process: (1) We will review Japan’s natural disaster prevention regimes; (2) we will examine the result of a field survey conducted in Hitachi City detailing the city’s natural disaster prevention procedures and the operation of some neighborhood evacuation sites; (3) the behavior of residents following the earthquake is analyzed. In this part, questionnaires were sent to 2000 households, of which 492 (24.6%) were collected and used for this analysis. The earthquake and tsunami destroyed lifelines such as water supply for several days in the city. According to the city, a total of 65 buildings were judged to be in dangerous condition, 251 as requiring care, and 478 were only partially damaged. The most serious damage was found mainly in the city’s coastal areas, where a total of 85 houses were entirely or partly damaged, and 483 houses were flooded above the floorboards by the tsunami. On March 11, a total of 69 evacuation sites opened, and 13,607 residents rushed into them. After the disaster, residents initially tried to go back to their homes. Depending on the damage done, they either stayed there or moved to a relative’s or friend’s house, or to a neighborhood evacuation site. Due to the failure of the lifelines, transportation systems, and the damage caused by the disaster, most residents had to stay within an area more limited than usual, around which they could walk or ride by bicycle. Residents had only the human and physical resources of their neighborhoods. Therefore, the characteristics of their local communities affected how residents behaved during and after the earthquake.

Citizen participation has attracted attention in the context of decentralization. In a disaster reconstruction process, a business plan for reconstruction can be modified in line with diversified situations of disaster-affected areas by citizen participation. In Japan, the central government makes a decision about the authority in charge of an overall disaster reconstruction and the budget planning, whereas local governments are in charge of creating and implementing a business plan for reconstruction of each local municipality. Therefore, local governments play an important role in organizing citizen participation to realize the reconstruction that fits reality. It has yet to be shown as decentralization reform and citizen participation system in Japan produce the socio-spatial inequality after the Great East Japan Earthquake. However, it remains to be elucidated how local government and community have to operate the institution about citizen participation during the disaster reconstruction process. I have been doing fieldwork on three tsunami-affected sites in Miyagi Prefecture over past 4 years: Onagawa Town, Higashimatsushima City, and Natori City. I have investigated the social processes of making and implementing a reconstruction plan, and citizen participation. The findings from my fieldwork are as follows: First, citizen participation is based on organizing residents at the community level. Second, traditional community organization (such as neighborhood organization abd industrial associations) contribute to organize residents especially in the emergency phase. Third, as the disaster phase moves, local government and community organization need to change the previous participation frame to ensure residents representation and policy legitimacy.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the difficulties faced during the interview process in a cross-national qualitative comparative case study between Japan and Australia. It discusses the challenges in producing insightful data and preserving the integrity of findings when methodologies are influenced by different cultural and professional environments.

The paper explores literature on cross-national qualitative research in the context of policy research as well as the philosophical and professional differences between Japan and Western countries (like Australia). It reflects on practical examples and strategies used by the researcher during the ethics and interview processes when adapting widely accepted qualitative case study methodology to suit the Japanese cultural and professional environment.

The paper finds that linguistic, cultural, professional and philosophical differences between the countries challenged initial researcher assumptions that comparability between the case study regions would be maintained through the application of accepted methodologies and an “insider” status. It observes that the quest to generate rich and insightful data places the character and capability of the researcher as central in the research process.

This paper provides practical examples and strategies for social science researchers using interview methods in Japan and Australian. It points to a need for further research on the ambiguous and elusive nature of the “insider” paradigm as well as the “comparability” of cross-national qualitative case studies when methodological “flexibility” is used to enrich and preserve the integrity of research findings.

The aim of this study is to analyze the possible relationship between board characteristics and integrated reporting quality in an international setting.

To test the study's hypotheses, the authors applied linear regressions with a panel data, and the authors collected data from the Thomson Reuters database (ASSET4) and from the annual reports from European companies to analyze data of 253 listed companies selected from the environmental, social and governance (ESG) index between 2010 and 2019.

The reached empirical results prove to indicate well that both of the board size, independence and diversity appear to have a significantly positive effect on the integrated reporting quality. Noteworthy, also, is the fact that the appointment of an independent nonexecutive chairman is positively associated with the integrated reporting related quality, and holds for firms with a nonindependent chairman.

Beyond the theoretical implications, our study also has several practical implications. These findings are particularly relevant for managers, shareholders, and policymakers. Thus, stakeholders should consider the accuracy of disclosure in determining the optimal reporting strategy (reducing risk estimation, returns' stock volatility, increasing long-term shareholder value and reputation of the firm).

This article is motivated by the low number of works in the context about the corporate social responsibility and sustainability issues. It makes an important contribution to the academic literature by adding to the limited body of research on integrated reporting and corporate governance in an ESG company setting. The study is also important for practitioners seeking to improve the quality of their integrated reports.