Special Feature: Community Rights: New Hope

Community Rights

Power Countering State Power

Written by Riken Yamamoto

The intermediate group known as community appears to have collapsed almost catastrophically, especially in commercial districts in urban centers. Community is nonexistent in suburban residential areas and the numerous private apartment complexes.

But no one seems to mind. In fact, the majority of people consider this to be a welcome development.

Why?

Because they believe that living in a city means liberation from community. Many people enjoy the freedom of urban life and don’t want to be too close to their neighbors. On one side, there are many sociologists (I don’t know if they are all that many) who believe that this is the truth, and that it is actually honest to say so.

Many people have come to believe that community means being close to their neighbors. These days, the concept of community is nothing more than something to scoff at.

Is that really true? , wonders the architect.

Isn’t community a right? We have rights. The right to have power that opposes state power. That is community.

As Japanese citizens, we are endowed with basic human rights. So which is more important, state power or human rights?

State power fully seizes the right to run the country. This is because it is in the nation’s interest. It is the basis of power as conceived by those entrusted with running the country.

What are human rights? Freedom. The freedom to oppose state power. Individuals should be free as long as they do not cause trouble to others. However, from the perspective of state power, this is merely individual ego. That’s what state power says. At the very least, state power aims to benefit the nation. In contrast, isn’t the protection of human rights merely protecting individual ego? In the face of the theory of maximizing the interests of the nation, human rights (individual power) are relegated to that level.

State power versus human rights: where does this binary schema originate? Its origins are clear, said Hannah Arendt. She said it began with the French Revolution.

 “The freedom of the people lies in their private life. It must never be violated. Let government be the only power capable of protecting this simple and simple state from violence itself” (On Revolution, Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 1995). When Robespierre, Saint-Just and the Jacobin Club made this statement, they promised the destruction of intermediate groups that violated “private life.” State power exists to protect private freedoms; in fact, the period following the French Revolution gradually moved in that direction. Arendt says that this binary schema – freedom of private life and the state power that protects it – began here.

This binary schema finally began to appear in real urban spaces after World War I in Europe and after World War II in Japan. It was a state policy to privatize housing. Housing is for private life. Freedom lies in private life.

In Japan, in particular, this was institutionalized with remarkable speed. The Japan Housing Loan Corporation Act was enacted in 1950, followed by the Public Housing Act in 1951 and the Japan Housing Corporation Act in 1955. The Japan Housing Loan Corporation Act primarily supported those who built their own detached homes. The Public Housing Act supported local governments in building public housing. The Japan Housing Corporation was the central organization when the government took the lead in providing public housing. These housing support laws, enacted immediately after the war, determined the nature of housing in Japan thereafter. The public housing, urban apartment buildings, and suburban new towns built in large numbers under this support law were designed with spatial configurations that completely eliminated the possibility of intermediate groups such as communities.

The core of the support law is the principle of “one house = one family.” One family lives in one house. The family was confined within the house, and their freedom of private life was also confined within the house. The inside of the house was a space for freedom of private life, while the outside was a space carved out and bureaucratically managed by the bureaucracy. These two spaces were clearly separated, and the residents of the houses were carefully embedded within urban space to prevent them from interacting with each other. In fact, this has made Japanese urban space exceptionally easy for the state to manage.

 What is a community? It is a group that exists between private life and the state. It is the power of an intermediate group that exists between individual human rights and state power. Such “intermediate group power” is far removed from us who live in today’s “one house = one family” world. How can we regain that power? We have the right to create such intermediate groups as a single power. If we call this “community right,” then I believe that community rights, not human rights, are the only power that can oppose state power. Fundamental human rights are not the right to individual freedom. Aren’t they the right to create community rights in opposition to state power?