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영어

Seki Hajime, a mayor of Osaka city in the 1920s and 1930s, has been assessed as the city-policy maker and urban planner who not only shaped the city skeleton and the urban facets of the modern and contemporary Osaka, but also made the frame of the modern city administration and urban policy to which even the contemporary administrators must make reference. This article aims to discern the characteristics of his notion of the city and the urban planning from the angle of the history of ideas. Seki Hajime had been from a vassal family of Bakuhu(幕府) ruined in Meiji era, and trained to be an Imperial technocrats through the Tokyo Commercial College(東京高等商業學校). Even as the professor, he worked for the training of the high level technocrats demanded to the development of national economy. His municipal activities, I guess, were that these ideas had been transposed to the practices. In this regard, Seki's notion of the city placed the city as a premise of the development of the imperial national economy, and he conceived that the urban problems due to this development would ultimately act as an obstacle to that. Thus, his urban planning was one of urban policies that he had carried out for the solution of the urban problems, and had been implemented for this practical purpose. Looking Seki under the focus on the city and the urban planning, he appear as an imperial technocrat who functioned for the dream of national prosperity and military power of Imperial Japan, and so we can judge his notion of the city and the urban planning to be inclined to the practicalism for the service of the imperial national economy.