During the conference at The University of Osaka, you will be staying in and around northern Osaka. This excursion takes you a little beyond the university campus to Senri, an area that offers a fascinating window into modern Japanese society.

 

Senri New Town is one of Japan’s most significant planned residential developments. Built during the period of rapid economic growth, it drew on urban planning ideas developed in Europe and the United States and became an important model of postwar Japanese urban development. Its carefully planned housing estates and infrastructure have sometimes been viewed as symbols of the highly standardized landscape of Japan’s modernity.

 

Yet Senri is much more than a planned city.

 

Alongside the planned landscape of the New Town lies Kamishinden, a settlement whose history reaches back to the early modern period. Today, as the area enters a new phase of demographic ageing, local initiatives are also creating spaces where older people can gather, connect, and spend time together—forms of community and care that exist before, or alongside, formal welfare and care services.

 

Walking through Senri, we will explore the coexistence of planned and unplanned, formal and informal, past and present. The landscape allows us to consider how modernization has transformed Japanese communities, while also revealing the everyday practices and relationships that cannot be fully captured by urban plans or formal institutions.

 

Rather than visiting Japan as a tourist, this excursion invites you to look closely at an ordinary urban landscape and ask: What can a city tell us about Japanese society, its modern history, and the ways people create places to live together?

 

Join us for a walk through Senri, where the history of a village, the vision of a planned city, and contemporary practices of community and care meet.

 

The participation fee is expected to be approximately ¥500–1,000, covering materials and the guide’s honorarium. Further details will be announced later.