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Paper short abstract

Nishinari/Kamagasaki is re-theorized as a “service hub” enabling survival at the margins. The paper theorizes “gap institutions”: patching formal welfare, building networked supports, and formalizing them through deliberative forums - producing inclusion, but also sorting and temporal discipline.

Paper long abstract

Nishinari/Kamagasaki has recently been re-theorized locally not as a “problematic district” to be corrected, but as a “Nishinari-type service hub” – a concentration of practices and institutions that make survival administratively possible for people living at the edge of work, kinship, and documentation. This paper develops an anthropological account of that hub-making through a vernacular governance concept articulated as “gap institutions” (隙間の制度).

“Gap institutions” name a three-part craft of welfare infrastructure. First, local actors modify access to formal programs – “putting geta on” existing system/institution (制度) so that people can “step into” them despite eligibility frictions. Second, they build district-specific supports (ささえあいのしくみ) that are inseparable from dense local networks – e.g., supportive housing paired with multi-actor support coordination. Third, they refuse to leave these supports in the informal “valley”, instead pushing them toward recognition and resourcing as proper system/institution.

Methodologically, the paper reads “service hub” capacity not as an abstract policy label but as a politics of repeated agreement-making: governance forums and deliberative bodies designed to “ferment consent” over time, including a forum method operating since 1999 and other meeting architectures that coordinate residents’ associations, worker-support groups, and facility planning.

In conversation with scholarship on the institutional remaking of urban marginality in Japan, the paper argues that Nishinari’s hub is best understood as an infrastructure of inclusion-by-patching – a continuous labor of stitching together eligibility, housing, care, and everyday addressability, while also producing new forms of sorting and temporal discipline.