Community building from the view of gender studies in Kohoku new town, Kanagawa

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the processes of community building through observing residents' movements and activities in Kohoku New Town in Kanagawa. This paper demonstrates the following points: 1) The development of Kohoku New Town was characterized by participation of the residents in its planning. Residents mean landowners. A landowner is basically a householder who is a man, not a women. Therefore in the process of development, women had no way to participate. 2) The research at Kashinokidai-Haitsu using the questionnaire method revealed that the residents' ages, jobs, and cognition of residential and community space were similar. Most of the residents are in their early 30s to early 50s and 47% of men hold a managerial position and 48% of women have a job, including part-time work. The main reason of their choice of Kohoku New Town was its natural environment. 3) Community activities have kept pace with community building. In the Eda district they have been promoted because of the artifical characteristics of the space. The first community activity in the district aimed for the preservation of natural environment. Then the movement developed gradually into event activities, a consumers' movement, a political movement, and more recently a welfare movement. 4) The participants in commonly activities are mainly housewives, who are emancipated from their gender role during the community activities. They are full-time housewives or part-time workers. Gender role assigns them to domestic labor. A housewise is generally regarded only s a mother or wife, not as an independent individual. In this situation, they are frustrated by the lack of a reason for being; by participating in a movement, they find it. They type for participation is related to their life stage. The majority of the leading members in the activities do not have infant children. They utilize their free time by contributing to and working for the community movement. From these observations, it may be concluded that through the community movement, residents study and recognize their own community space, and then try to diversity it. Many women are obliged to accept their gender role as indicated by the hours they spend on domestic labor. Yet at the same time, many participate in the movement on order to emancipate themselves from their gender role and to develop their community space. One can therefore conclude that community movements play an important role in building community in Kohoku New Town.