33 電車の終点には，住宅地と電力があった．西東京がこのモ デルで発展させられたのは，1923 年の関東大震災が，東部 の都民たちを風下で暮らすという伝統からようやくふるい 落とした後のことだ．1925年山手線の円がつながったとき， この都市の新しい境界線，仮想の城壁が確立された．しかし， その城壁の結びの内に機能的な中心はなく，ただ中心業務 地区（CBD）や販売基点の連なりに過ぎない． 戦後，世界規模の人口増加に伴い，都市に関する考えが 焼き直された．東京の中心部である山手線の内側の区域は， 1 世代の間ずっと，1 日約 1,000 人の規模で新たな住人が 増え続けた．都市の輪郭は粘菌類のように拡大し，1968 年 までに世界最大の集合都市，東京大都市圏となった．以来， 世界最大の労働人口を抱える中心業務地区であり続けてい る．戦後のアメリカ政府の指導により都市部の大土地所有 は解体され，戦後には荘園的な 4% であった土地所有者は， 現在 43.7% へと増加した．デフレ後の静けさのなか，過去 の近代都市戦線が消失する．2 ヵ月前，堤と五島の路線は 安藤忠雄の設計による渋谷の新高層駅ビル計画のもと，そ の他の 2 本の路線を含めて合併した．銃弾は放たれなかっ た．［2013 年 5 月］● {Re}assembling Public Space ―― Evolving Geographies of Contestation, Celebration, and Collaboration in Contemporary Tokyo Christian DIMMER （Urbanist / Researcher） When Walter Lippmann 1 famously called the public a phantom he meant less to question its very existence, but to stress its fragile and rather provisional nature  that it could cease to exist, once no longer upheld, re-assembled, or performed. Clive Barnett suggests that publics do not simply exist a priori , but must be convened, or called into being in open-ended, contingent processes without any certainty of success 2 . Nancy Fraser, in turn, highlights the presence of many “subaltern Counterpublics ,” where marginalised groups can come together to discuss matters of common concern 3 . The absurdity of the idea of a single, unitary public sphere, where only the quality of the best argument matters but not the identities of those who present it, is nicely expressed by Bruno Latour: “We were told (by the public sphere thinkers) that all of us  on entering this dome, this public sphere  had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses. Taking our seat under the transparent crystal of the common good, through the action of some mysterious machinery, we would then be collectively endowed with more acute vision and higher virtue.” 4 By suggesting that the public and the political are constantly {re}assembled through devices, procedures, and mediums, crystallising around specific issues, or topoi, Latour shifts our attention to the processes of how publics are created, and emphasises the many small, mundane acts and things that support these processes. This exposition, then, is to point out the performative and ephemeral quality of ‘true’ public space, or the rare instance when a public sphere is temporally supported, or even convened into being by a physical setting. In such a moment a public space turns into more than just a state- owned venue of accidental, amorphous sociability and begins to take on a broader collective, often political, relevance. Take the so-called sound-demo{nstration}s in the streets of major Japanese cities, where organisers have deliberately sought to combine elements of art and activism since the early 2000s 5 . By using, for example, mediated musical forms and devices such as DJ soundtracks with dance, identity-camouflaging and forming cos play costuming, and neo-folk elements, these activists were trying to shed the unfavourable image associated with the often violent mass protests of the past, rallied by a highly hierarchic, factionalised and ideological political left, and drawing attention to diverse causes such as opposing to the neoliberal, law-and-order, or pro-Iraq War politics of the then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, or to Tokyo’ s nationalist governor Shintaro Ishihara; together with disenfranchisement, or growing precarity. To mobilise the political potential of their own demographic and to appeal to wider strata of youth culture, organisers introduced celebratory “elements of the pleasure principle, of {popular} mass culture.” 5 It is less the highly symbolical, yet inanimate, public spaces like the parliament or the imperial palace plaza that became frequent sites for contemporary protests, but the everyday spaces of conspicuous consumption in central Tokyo’s Shibuya, or Shinjuku. These new demonstrations became grab bags of varying political