Finding a New Commons: Re-Inhabiting the School in Post-Urban Japan

Abstract

Japan’s megacities are often portrayed as dense, dynamic and ever-expanding. These images, disseminated in popular media, belie a growing national phenomenon; urban migration, a declining birthrate and an aging population have transformed Japan’s countryside over the past thirty years. These demographic changes have had a slow but dramatic effect, resulting in socio-economic decline, abandoned buildings and a loss of local cultures across the country. This thesis explores how re-inhabited architecture might facilitate the preservation of culture, knowledge, education, and community connections to local contexts. 

Among the vast number of leftover buildings in Japan’s rural areas, the public school is becoming increasingly prevalent due to waning fertility rates. These vacant structures, referred to as haikō in Japanese, are imbued with collective memory. In villages needing a revival of public and cultural spaces, schools with existing relationships to the community are potent opportunities for re-use. Using fieldwork consisting of documenting haikō in three culturally and geographically distinct sites (Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, Kamocho region, Tsuyama Municipality, Okayama Prefecture, and Kamiyama Village, Tokushima Prefecture), and ethnographic interviews with community members, the three design projects of the thesis explore how the re-use of haikō could generate new rural lifestyles and relationships to landscapes. 

The research presents emerging methodologies for designers working in the context of depopulating communities, which includes interviews with communities, analytical site mapping, and techniques of building re-use. This concept of “degrowth” poses a challenge for architecture, a profession significantly influenced by the capitalist structures and administrative frameworks of urban areas. In this way, Japan’s rural areas, or “the post-urban” are a testing ground for new design processes, programmatic overlaps and plurality in public architecture. 

Key words: degrowth, rural, Japan, material culture, depopulation, cultural knowledge, cultural sustainability, community-informed design, design ethnography, post-urban, local, vernacular, adaptive re-use

Supervisor: Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo

Committee member: Jane Hutton, University of Waterloo

The images and text under Thesis: Finding a New Commons are excerpts from the research (context + fieldwork) and the design projects. The full thesis can be downloaded via the University of Waterloo here. All images are by Julia Nakanishi unless otherwise stated.