[URBANTH-L]Your advice, please

[John McCreery]

Ruth and John McCreery have submitted the following abstract for the SUNTA
panel at the SEAA meeting in Taipei this coming July.

> *Domestication and Liminality: Planning Yokohama*
>
>
> This paper surveys the history of urban planning in Yokohama, where the
> two have been inseparable since the city's beginning. The earliest
> planning preceded the opening of the treaty port in 1859. The Great Kanto
> Earthquake of 1923,  the bombing of the city in 1945, and the growth of
> Japan's economy to the second largest in the world, culminating in the
> bubble of the late 1980s, spurred new waves of planning. At every stage,
> the relationship between the planned core of the city and unplanned
> development around that core has been problematic, and the cultural and
> physical presence of the non-Japanese, which is said to give the city an
> especially cosmopolitan flavor, has been an inescapable topic. Current
> attempts to position the city as "Creative City Yokohama" raise an
> interesting question: Can any planning process domesticate the liminal
> spaces where urban disorder has flourished without stifling the  creativity
> that historically arises from disorder?
>

As independent scholars, we are not as familiar with the current literature
in urban anthropology as we ought to be. We have begun the process of
collecting syllabi from the Internet and building a list of possible
sources. It is already clear, however, that if we try to look at everything
that is being taught in even the handful of syllabi we have gathered so far,
the paper will never get written. Thus, the question I put to you: Given the
topics mentioned in our abstract, what would be on your must-read, must-cite
list?

Your advice will be greatly appreciated.


John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm at wordworks.jp
http://www.wordworks.jp/