<論説>ジェンダーと郊外 --戦後日本における計画空間の誕生とその変容-- (特集 : ジェンダー)

Abstract

本研究では、戦後に計画空間としてつくられた郊外の誕生経緯と機能を整理し、近年生じている新たな郊外の変容について、ジェンダーの視点から考察することを目的とする。高度経済成長期の日本では、地方から都市へ労働力として多くの人々が移動した。こうした人々の住宅難を解決するため、国や旧日本住宅公団による大規模な宅地開発が行われた。このような開発は、経済成長の過程における「良質な労働力確保」を目的としていたため、結果として、ビジネスや生産機能に特化した都心に対し、住機能や再生産に特化した郊外が誕生した。こうして日本の大都市圏は、近代家族を前提としながら、完全な職住分離の構造をなしたのである。しかし近年、グローバル化など変化の波により、都市郊外は過渡期を迎えている。本研究では、大阪府千里ニュータウンに暮らす女性たちのライフストーリーを検討し、戦後の日本に計画空間として造成された郊外が、既存のジェンダー秩序を乗り越える変容を遂げつつあるのかについて考察したい。

This study aims to retrace the origins, history and functions of the suburbs that were created as planned spaces after World War II and to investigate the evolution of new suburbs, which have emerged in recent years, from the perspective of gender. During the period of Japanese high economic growth, many people migrated from rural to urban areas as an integral part of the labor force. As a consequence, in metropolitan areas including Tokyo, population growth was accompanied by serious housing shortages. To counter this, residential land was developed by the state, private developers, and what was then known as the Japan Housing Corporation. In the suburban areas of the cities, there was a large quantity of housing, including not only single-family houses, but also apartment buildings with units that had a typical layout comprised two bedrooms plus an open-space living, dining, and kitchen area. Residential land development in the suburbs had a major role in resolving the housing shortage problem. However, because one of the goals was to secure a high-quality labor force during the economic growth process, residents who had moved to housing complexes in the suburbs all had very similar life cycles, including household composition and the time of entering their new homes. As a result, two distinct spaces emerged: the city center, specializing in business functions and containing the workplaces where the husbands were employed; and the suburbs, specializing in living functions and containing the homes where the wives managed housework and child rearing. Thus, in Japanese metropolitan areas, a structure of complete homeworkplace separation was created, premised on the gender roles of the modern family. As planned spaces, suburbs stifled elements of social and cultural diversity, excluding people of different nationalities, social classes, and sexual orientations, and preserved the norms of the standard nuclear family. When office workers and their families first began to move into the suburban housing complexes and “new towns” built since 1970, the lives of married women were taken up by the unpaid housework that they performed as full-time housewives. At the time, men were viewed as the central labor force of industrialization, and the work of supporting them as they labored outside the home fell to women as housewives. In post-war Japan, employers and state authorities had devised an effective system for preserving the health of the labor force by having women shoulder the responsibility of caring for working men, providing them with meals, laundry, health management, and more. As the housewives who cared for the men who performed productive labor did so without pay, this system reduced corporate and state costs needed for the health management and relaxation of the labor force. On the other hand, in terms of social security, measures were in place to mitigate the risks posed by illness or unemployment of the working male head of the family, and to support his wife and children as his dependents. Thus, the nuclear family structured around a gendered division of labor, with a working husband and a homemaker wife, took on the function of reproducing the existing labor market, and became an instrument of its reproduction. In recent years, suburbs have undergone a transformation amid the momentous changes brought about by declining birthrates and an aging population, globalization, neoliberalism, and the like. This has meant that the dichotomy between home and workplace based on the male breadwinner model has crumbled, and the urban systems built around this structure have already ceased to function sufficiently in Japanese society. In view of this, the present study focuses on the life stories of the residents from the perspective of gender, investigating their efforts to rearrange their spatial order and reconstruct their relationships beyond conventional roles. Women devoted to their roles in isolation within a divided, homogenous space have formed networks and relationships of mutual trust with other women in the same position and have reconsidered their norms and values. Nevertheless, some have suffered unjust exclusion from the public realm of the workplace and other places and have also had limitations imposed on their life space. This means that the time is approaching to re-examine the function and order of uniform planned space, which still defines the lifestyles of its residents and of women residents in particular. In conclusion, initiatives aimed at preserving “new towns” as a space for the modern family of the future just as they were during the 50 years after World War II would ultimately result in a regression that goes against the current of the times, making city suburbs into veritable “old towns.”