Abstracts Category : Other

Salvage in Ybari: Machizukuri Against Decline

by mile St-Pierre

Using Anna Tsings (2015) concept of salvage, this thesis examines how machizukuri (town-building) activities salvage the effects of decline in the former mining city of Ybari into building a rural Japanese town. Rather than evaluating machizukuri activities based on their ability to produce capitalist value, reverse demographic decline, and restore progress, these activities are discussed as projects of salvage concerned with finding value in and caring for places and people left behind by progress. I review the history of teleological projects of progress in Hokkaido to showcase Ybaris historical association with progress, and its subsequent association with economic and demographic decline following the end of the mining industry from the 1950s and its bankruptcy in 2006. I discuss the activities of a local organization and its re-use of a former power plant, using this example to highlight how heritage and pride in local history is salvaged from what would otherwise be ruins. I then use the example of slag heaps to unearth problems with the use of nostalgia to describe rural revitalization efforts. Slag heaps are also used to interpret how the emotionally powerful language of the rural hometown is salvaged to showcase Ybari as a warm, rural Japanese town instead of a declining coal mining city of the colonial frontier. I also consider how the conditions of rural decline can be salvaged to be part of networks of care in Ybari: better ways of relating might be emerging from the places left behind by growth-driven development.