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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• social infrastructure
• Japan
• service hub
• voluntary sector
• poverty

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge the support of the British Academy (514112), Alan Latham and Jack Layton for organizing the 2019 AAG sessions on social infrastructure, and the tireless work of the organizations of Kamagasaki to sustain the vulnerable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The official place name Kamagasaki disappeared in 1922, and “Kamagasaki” is today only used by day laborers and associates to refer to the area. Therefore, it cannot be found on maps.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [514112].