I had an assignment in the class of Urban Studies and I and my teammates were doing survey in Ginza and Shibuya.
As I said, we were searching for the authority of political, religious and cultural forces.
Let me explain what I did for my project. Since this is last semester for me as student, I did put my energy to my assignment and enjoy group work so much!
Our examination both in Ginza and Shibuya shows that different social trust by different urban characteristics in social behavior in Tokyo. We examined that social trust among urbanites is different in limited ways from cities to cities depending on the environment where people existing there creates.
After our surveying 40 people in privately owned public space in Shinjuku Southern Terrace Starbucks, we were able to get a basic idea of people’s perspective of urbanized characters. The reason we picked Starbucks because we believed it was a neutral comfort zone that can be easily found in any other cities.
With the result of the survey we decided to see how Public Spaces with different environment and characteristics would change people’s reaction to the stereotypical urban characters. We picked Sunday afternoon of Ginza for a cozy family oriented atmosphere which seemed like a very friendly environment. In our expectation when there is less car traffic, the plaza takes more leisurely atmosphere and the open space in Ginza would welcome the public. Also, we picked the space at Shibuya station featuring statue of the Hachiko dog as the counterpart of the space in Ginza. In the rush hour of Shibuya 6-8pm, a crowd of people are more disturbed by the daily life. Shibuya gave us a feeling of bit harshness of the city.
In order to draw out the people’s reaction we picked the method of asking them if we can borrow their cellular phone. We decided to ask for the Cellular phone because it was a very common item that we can expect people to have in the urban society and often times, the item often holds very valuable personal information.
From our experiments, we found that degree of tangible substances which is inevitable in our daily life is different in Ginza and Shibuya. Shibuya is successful to make up social unit in fellowship, sympathy and social intercourse. In Ginza, there does appear to be less social trust between neighbors and less helpfulness and consideration shown toward strangers.
This is the work we made for our presentation in the class!