Toward Urban Studies Based on Migration and Mobility:

This paper reviews the theme of 2023 JAUS symposium, “Reconsidering Migration to Cities”. Migration and mobility is an old and new theme concerning cities and regions. Current academic interest is focused not only on migration, in which people move from one place to another, but also on the nature of a mobile society that are always on the move. Simultaneously, the trend of concentration to the Tokyo metropolitan area remains firm, with the excess of residents moving in even after the Covid-19 disaster. We intended to reexamine the rigid structures which encourages overwhelming domestic migration from non-metropolitan areas to metropolitan areas. These structures continues to operate even in an increasingly mobile society. Three perspectives are referred to discuss regional migration: the increasing complexity pointed out by mobilities studies, the social structures created through the social production of space, and the social consciousness on migration experiences. Urban and regional sociology can contribute by synthesizing these perspectives, making use of a wide accumulation of various empirical studies. Inter-regional and intra-regional disparities in mobility experiences are described in the latter half of this paper. In addition to the polarization into college-going migration and non-migration after high school graduation, there is also a polarization in the U-turn choice after higher education. The individual makes sense of his/her own situation and chooses not to deviate from the reference group, and the accumulation of their decisions creates the trend of migration. Mobile society does not necessarily mean that everyone can move in and out freely. It should be the role of sociology to delve into the ways in which people reflexively interpret their own lives, and to delve into the consciousness on “city”, “region”, and other spatial vocabularies.