Urban poverty and regulation, new spaces and old: Japan and the US in comparison

After the 1970s the new urban poverty (NUP) ballooned in Japan and the US, and it evoked policy responses that produced new, rescaled regulatory spaces to contain the poor on the fringe of social rights and the capital circuit. The paper illuminates this process through the comparison of Japanese and US trajectories, both of which, evolving through economic crises, have established unique pathways. The author first constructs a theoretical framework based on Marxian, Polanyian, and Lefebvrean traditions. Then, he compares national-scale poverty regulation in Japan and the US from the 1950s through the 2000s. Lastly, the author examines how the countries’ regulation of a major aspect of the NUP—homelessness—intensified multiscalar rescaling processes. The article concludes that regulation of the NUP represents a significant instance of uneven spatial development of capitalism mediated by the state that requires synthetic research. Keywords: rescaling, homelessness, ghettoization, the new urban poverty, regulation theory, the capital circuit, uneven spatial development