Planning for the slow lane: The need to restore working greenspaces in maturing contexts

Landscape and urban planning is increasingly shaped by maturing conditions of economic stagnation and upward demographic shifts. Planners must grapple with the challenges that maturation brings, while opportunistically directing the “slow lane” of low-growth trajectories towards more sustainable progress. New directions demand new concepts and approaches, and super-aging and economically faltering Japan provides valuable lessons. We describe how concepts and practices maligned in high-growth modernity are being reinvented in the low-growth present. Focusing on urban agriculture and woodland management, we show that restoration of working urban greenspaces provides a strategy for planners to direct the slow lane towards urban sustainability.