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The contributions in this volume shed light on the urban bottom, particularly the very bottom people, in six global cities: Tokyo, New York, Paris, Nairobi, Mexico City, and Manila.
Urban bottom is a hierarchical concept that captures urban populations systematically bottomized under neoliberal capitalism. Using urban bottom as its key analytical concept, the book examines the labor, everyday lives, social networks, mobility, and lifeworlds of these populations, including female workers, young people, immigrants, sex workers, slum residents, street vendors, homeless individuals, and welfare recipients. It explores how they struggle to survive amid informal and unstable living conditions, and offers a typological analysis that reveals similarities and differences across cities.
Hideo Aoki is the chief director of Institute of Social Theory and Dynamics in Hiroshima. He has studied homelessness in Japan. He is co-editor of Bottom Worker in East Asia: Composition and Transformation under Neoliberal Globalization (2023).
Motoji Matsuda is a specially appointed professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. He organized the African Potentials Project to decentralize Western-centric humanities and is the general editor of the eight-volume African Potentials Series.
Acknowledgement
Illustrations and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Prologue
Hideo Aoki
Part 1 Tokyo
Introduction: Tokyo’s Urban Bottom
Keiko Yamaguchi and Yuki Tsubasa
1 Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Urban Bottom Measure
Tamaki Matsuo
2 Selection and Management of Urban Bottom by Welfare Systems
Yukihiko Kitagawa
3 The Urban Bottom and Labor Informality in Tokyo
Keiko Yamaguchi
4 Remapping the Geography of Homelessness in Tokyo: Reconfiguration of Gray Space
Tsubasa Yuki
5 Concluding Remark: Dystopian Tokyo: Fragmentation and Depoliticization of the Urban Bottom
Tsubasa Yuki
Part 2 New York
Introduction: Wider Contexts and Changes over the Last Forty Years
Terry Williams and Yutaka Nakamura
6 Public Philosophy of the Street: a Note on Informality and Street Vendor in New York City
Yutaka Nakamura
7 Homelessness-Spatial Informality in Urban Bottom
Terry Williams
Part 3 Paris
8 Urban Marginality and Public Space in Paris from a Gender Perspective: Gentrification, Public Policies and Migrant Women’s Body
Chikako Mori and Hélène Le Bail
Part 4 Nairobi
Introduction: Nairobi’s Urban Bottom
Motoji Matsuda and Wangui Kimari
9 Enduring Solidarities: Mutual Aid and the Urban Bottom in Nairobi
Wangui Kimari
10 How was the COVID-19 Disaster Experienced in Urban Bottom Nairobi? A Case Study of Kangemi
Motoji Matsuda
11 Conclusion: a New Sense of Solidarity among the Urban Bottom
Wangui Kimari and Motoji Matsuda
Part 5 Mexico City
12 Spectral Vulnerability of the Urban Bottom People in Mexico City
Heriberto Ruiz Tafoya
13 A Case Study of the Dynamics as Involution in the Informal Economy in a Colony of the Most Marginal Society in Mexico City
Hideki Nakata
Part 6 Manila
Introduction: the Urban Bottom in Manila
Mai Yoshida
14 Creating a Space of Exception through Urban Politics and Housing Policy
Anna Marie-Karaos
15 Exit from “the Space of Exception”: Continuous Supplying of Women’s Labor for Global Capital from the Urban Bottom
Chiho Ogaya
16 Imprisoned in “the Space of Exception”: the Case of Street Vendors in Manila
Mai Yoshida
17 The Imprisoned Homeless
Gerald Nicolas
18 Conclusion: Manila as a Space of Exception in a Global City
Mai Yoshida
Epilogue
Motoji Matsuda
Index