Decentralizing Governance in a Transborder Urban Age: East Asia and the Busan–Fukuoka ‘Common Living Sphere’

The devolution of political power to local governments is taking new directions as cities begin to look beyond national borders to create economic synergies with city regions in other countries rather than continuing to look to linkages with their capital cities for economic benefits. In East Asia the search for transborder urban linkages comes at a time when secondary cities in higher income countries are confronting major social and economic transformations. These new trends include: the rise of China in the global economy, the turn toward neoliberal downsizing of government, demographic transitions toward declining, rapidly aging populations with a diminishing labour force compensated partly by the large-scale recruitment of foreign workers and foreign spouses. The combined result of the new dynamics is that just when political power is being devolved to the urban scale, the global trend of “shrinking cities” has reached them. The discussion focuses on recent initiatives of the local governments of Busan, South Korea, and Fukuoka, Japan, to build a “common living sphere” through transborder linkages to provide a culturally rich, people-centered alternative that contrasts with the high-technology industrial clusters being planned for them from their corporatized capital cities. In addition to economic issues, cities engaged in such transborder initiatives challenge the meaning of national borders and citizenship while also confronting new issues in accommodating the appearance of multicultural societies, which have all remained outside of mainstream discussions on decentralization.