Benjamin Bansal

National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies · State Building and Economic Development

This article critically evaluates a 1967 consultancy report on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) by Professor William A. Robson. Robson, a pioneer of public administration science based at the London School of Economics his whole academic life, provided an in-depth analysis of the state of the Japanese capital during its high-speed growth spu...

Is it possible to design a city that possesses Tokyo’s best qualities? Yes, say Tokyo-based urbanist Jorge Almazán and his lab in this book.

This paper develops a "Tokyo model" of urban development during the 1955-1975 postwar period. To this end, data on physical attributes and socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods is analyzed for administrative subunits of the Tokyo prefecture. It is found that a set of generic neighborhood features, distributed evenly across the special ward...

This bibliography focuses on select English language works, including those that have been translated from Japanese. It is organized by topics, starting with some general historical overviews, and then moving on to specific themes, with some overlap and “cross-fertilization” unavoidable and intended.

This paper demonstrates empirically that Tokyo’s rapid post-war growth coincided with decreasing intra-urban inequalities in the special ward area, both in terms of private and public living standards. This phenomenon has not received much attention to date because Japan’s income inequalities were generally very low during this period. However, meg...

This paper demonstrates that small manufacturing firms in postwar Tokyo were exceptionally successful. Not only were they more productive than their national peers, they were also remarkably competitive vis-à-vis large factories in Tokyo. The existing explanations for this double outperformance do not take full account of the urban setting in which...

This dissertation addresses the role of urban space in the postwar economic history of Tokyo. It argues that the Japanese capital followed a peculiar pathway to urbanization in this period and did not adhere to conventional and Eurocentric models. Mixed-use neighborhoods, permissive zoning and an intense use of space particularly benefited the succ...