Part of the reason that professor André Sorensen, an urban geographer at the University of Toronto, chose Japanese city planning in the early 1990s as his academic niche is that the topic had barely been explored at the time, at least in English. “Japan was the second-largest economy in the world, and there was almost nothing written about it,” says Sorensen, whose Ph.D. focused on Tokyo’s problematic sprawl and whose books have included 2004’s “The Making of Urban Japan.”
From 1994 to 2002, Sorensen lived in Japan, conducting research and teaching. He was in the city of Kobe to witness the devastation caused by a magnitude-7.2 earthquake in 1995.