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Japan’s recent economic, demographic, and environmental precarities have raised governmental concerns about urban sustainability writ large. In addition to the environmental considerations about the urban carbon footprint and natural disaster risk, the Japanese state views the lowered urban population density amid the nation’s demographic decline a major threat to the fiscal sustainability of public services such as medical care and commerce. To tackle this risk, the state has launched a planned urban shrinkage project that aims to maintain urban vitality by consolidating financial, material, and human resources in designated city centers, while largely divesting from suburbs. Using the case of the City of Toyama, this paper examines how this state project utilizes particular infrastructures of transport and mobility as a material and representational mediation for the urban aesthetics of vibrancy. The project’s aesthetic aspect raises broader questions about what and whose urbanity gets sustained in the name of urban sustainability.