The June 14 Guardian article “Has Tokyo reached ‘peak city’?” discusses current conditions in Tokyo, Japan.
Professor André Sorensen, a scholar of Japanese urban planning, provided commentary for the article, some of which is quoted below.
“Tokyo is the first megacity to see the end of growth,” says André Sorensen, professor at the department of human geography at the University of Toronto, whose 2002 book “The Making of Urban Japan” was widely praised as key to understanding Japanese urban planning. “It offers important lessons for cities around the world, as ‘peak urban’ will increasingly be seen elsewhere over the rest of this century as the world becomes fully urban and population growth slows and then starts to decline.”
He points out that Japan is essentially “fully urban” – 94.7% of its population lived in cities in 2015 – but thinks Tokyo may now start to contract. “Although the Tokyo core area is currently gaining population because of migration from the rest of Japan and recentralisation from its own suburbs, the region as a whole has already started to lose population. It is projected that the total population of Japan will decrease from 128 million in 2010 to about 87 million in 2060, or by about 800,000 per year.”
Reference: “The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-first Century,” by André Sorensen. London: Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series, 2002, 352 pp. (Hardcover ISBN 0-415226-51-1).