"Under Brumann's gaze, the city truly comes down to earth, as the author variously introduces the reader to the interactions of unscrupulous property developers community activists, passive homeowners, consultant academics, low- and high-level bureaucrats, and even, as we come to find out, the researcher himself, as he pilots his way across a highly politicized landscape. [ ...] The broad treatment of everything from high profile, nationally and even internationally contested initiatives, to the description of ultra-local dynamics that would be little understood outside the internal cultural logic and contexts of Kyoto situates this work as the most comprehensive investigation of how intra-cultural diversity and interaction drive the construction and maintenance of Japan's ancient capital city." Bruce White, Donisha University, in the Social Science Japan Journal, 16(2), pp.318-20.
"There are few greater conundrums than Kyoto, a city which combines what is most beautiful in Japan with what is also most ugly. Christoph Brumanns superb ethnography of the process of town planning (and non-planning) and the interaction between the city authorities and its citizen groups explores this conundrum in a manner which has resonances not only for understanding the development of Japanese townscapes more widely but indeed the development of any modern city in the democratic world." Roger Goodman, University of Oxford, UK
"A theoretically informed, ethnographically rich and very well-written account of the tension between developing Kyoto and maintaining its unique heritage as a global historical city." Eyal Ben-Ari, Research Institute on Society, Security and Peace, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee
"This is good ethnography based on substantial periods of fieldwork. Brumann witnessed some achievements of the citizens that will ensure Kyoto's special place long into the future, during a time when some quite spectacular change was also taking place." Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University, UK
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