Professor Tony Chapman

This is a collaborative project working group including, Professor Tomoaki Shibukawa (Tohoku University of Community Service and Science), Dr Tomohito Nakajima (Sanno University) and Professor Tokihiko Takatani (Tohoku Koeki University).

The project is a cross-national study of social enterprise funded, initially, by the Japanese Government from 2007-12. The study is continuing, involving a series of annual visits and collaborative research which aims to explore:

● different ways that social enterprises have been established in their cultural, economic and political context;
● identify how social enterprises produce innovative solutions to encourage the development of sustainable communities.
● how areas which have suffered from significant restructuring adopt different approaches to the development of social enterprise in order to encourage economic regeneration.

As the project evolves, new members have joined the study group and engaged in visits to North East England and Yamagata and the Tokyo metropolitan area of Japan. Findings from the study were recently published in Leary and McCarthy The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration 2014.