The service hub as bypassed social infrastructure: evidence from inner-city Osaka.

DeVerteuil, G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3036-9303, Kiener, J. and Mizuuchi, T. 2022. The service hub as bypassed social infrastructure: evidence from inner-city Osaka. Urban Geography 43 (5) , pp. 669-687. 10.1080/02723638.2020.1826751

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Abstract

We shed light on understudied social infrastructure by focusing on the service hub, those conspicuous clusters of voluntary sector organizations designed to help the most vulnerable urban populations. Using Kamagasaki, Osaka as an exploratory case study, we find that the service hub acts as a distinctly inner-city social infrastructure marked by very close proximity of clients and services, as well as high accessibility, mutuality, and provisionality, and clear motivations to ensure day-to-day survival. But the conversation between service hub and social infrastructure indicates that our case study must be understood as a bypassed infrastructure, unsung and out-of-sync with the market (but increasingly less so with the state). Kamagasaki suggested an social infrastructure of castoffs, standing apart and increasingly incompatible with current urbanism and its emphasis on privatization, gentrification, and neoliberal co-optation, or even with the older “infrastructural ideal” of the Fordist era, with its emphasis on large-scale universality.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	0272-3638
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 October 2020
Date of Acceptance:	17 September 2020
Last Modified:	18 Nov 2024 11:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/135962

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