Explaining asymmetric urbanism: contingent infrastructure, conjunctural space, and ideational hegemony in Tokyo

Urban geographers have recently developed a non-normative strand of conjunctural analysis and have begun drawing on analytical concepts related to historical institutionalism (HI). This paper engages with this progress to elaborate on a conjunctural-institutional approach. It argues for combining the spatial and ideational focus of conjunctural analysis with the temporal and institutional focus of HI, emphasizing their shared ground of understanding political power through historical turning points. This approach is illustrated by a five-step critical juncture analysis to explain asymmetric urbanism in greater Tokyo after the railway reform from 1982 to 1987. This analysis finds that the path dependence of an early twentieth-century institution led to the reform of allowing and expecting railway entities nationwide to be financially self-sufficient through profit from non-transport businesses. This idea became hegemonic and intersected with neoliberal reforms across sectors. Their intersection induced asymmetric urbanism, comprising physically polarized yet institutionally bound skyscraper complexes and automobile suburbs, alongside sporadically planned inner-ring cores. This finding reveals that transport shapes urban space as a socio-political process rather than simply as a physical function. It then advances asymmetric urbanism, underpinned by conjunctural-institutional thinking, as a mid-level concept for interpreting metropolitan conditions shaped by contingent transport infrastructure.