Name: CJS Noon Lecture Series | Why Place Matters: The “Publicness” of the Lost Landscape
Start: 2026-01-22T12:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-01-22T13:30:00-05:00
Location: Weiser Hall, University of Michigan

$CJS Noon Lecture Series | Why Place Matters: The \u201cPublicness\u201d of the Lost Landscape$

Please note: This lecture will be held in person in room 1010, Weiser Hall, and virtually on Zoom. This talk is free and open to the public, but registration is required for the webinar. Register for the Zoom webinar at https://myumi.ch/P3Z9P.
This lecture is based on Dr. Horikawa’s 41 years of intensive fieldwork, chronicling a major movement that shaped preservation policy in Japan. It tries to provide a clear answer to the century-old question: why does place matter? Dr. Horikawa illustrates how the movement to preserve the Otaru Canal in Otaru, Japan, was neither conservative nor an obstacle, demonstrating that preservation can allow for and even promote change.
Saburo Horikawa is a professor of urban & environmental sociology at Hosei University in Tokyo, and he received his Ph.D. from Keio University. He has won three major academic awards, including one from the discipline of city planning, for his book published by the University of Tokyo Press. The English edition of the book, Why Place Matters: A Sociological Study of the Historic Preservation Movement in Otaru, Japan, 1965–2017, was published by Springer and was reviewed in the Journal of the American Planning Association.
Photo credit: The Rikisha in front of Old Mitsui Bank in Otaru, Hokkaido
Copyright © 2015 by Saburo Horikawa. All rights reserved.