Planning a ‘sustainable city’ with hinterlands: the case of Yokohama City, Japan and its soft space planning to reach net-zero

This research paper draws on the re-scaling of urban studies, city–hinterland metabolic links and the emergence of soft space planning to analyse the case of Yokohama city and its collaboration initiative crossing municipal borders to ‘import’ clean electricity. Through the analysis, the paper interrogates how the urban sustainability idea, with the recognition of the roles played by spaces beyond city boundaries, is unfolding, with a particular focus on the negotiations taking place between a city and hinterlands. The objective also extends to revealing how the initiative reinterprets city–hinterland relationships. This research identified that the initiative was shaped based on the city's understanding of the issue, which allowed the city to have a dominant influence in the following negotiations to arrange the initiative's details. Through the investigation of those negotiations, evidence showed the presence of power asymmetries and the hinterlands’ vulnerability to ‘being used’ by a city and raised questions on the initiative's quality to deliver desirable outcomes. The paper discusses them as this initiative's weaknesses, which are also areas for future studies to investigate how the city–hinterland soft space approach could enhance urban sustainability.