Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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The authors of Emergent Tokyo acknowledge the distinct character of Tokyo without essentialising or fetishising it, offering visitors, architects, and urban policy practitioners an unparalleled understanding of Tokyo's urban landscape. This is a sad fact, but on the positive side many of these covered waterways are now used as intimate walking spaces and as extensions of residences or businesses. This book examines the urban fabric of contemporary Tokyo as a valuable demonstration of permeable, inclusive, and adaptive urban patterns that required neither extensive master planning nor corporate urbanism to develop. And in unpacking the conditions of Tokyo's development, Emergent Tokyo seeks to offer an alternative to the "corporate led urbanism" which we see in so many megacities (including in Marunouchi and Roppongi in Tokyo today), so that others can "design Tokyo-esque adaptability and spontaneity" into their cities.

I love the former and have enjoyed learning more about urban planning and the damage that profit maximising developments can cause to the liveability of a city. I also enjoyed the section on undertrack infills, and I wish cities in the US would incorporate these.

Emergent Tokyo zooms into the zakkyo of Yasukuni Ave, near Shinjuku Station, Kagurazaka Street in Shinjuku Ward, and the Karasumori zakkyo block in Shimbashi. I highly recommend the book to people interested in urban design—the graphics are especially well done. Les informations sur les particularités de Tokyo ainsi que leurs origines sont intéressantes, mais la recherche s’arrête là. Emergent Tokyo explores the city's conditions of development by examining 5 Tokyo patterns: yokocho alleyways; multi-tenant zakkyo buildings; undertrack infills; ankyo streets; dense low-rise neighbourhoods. Whether you are someone who is interested in urban design, or you just love visiting Tokyo, this book has something for you.

Additionally, this book succeeds excellently in explaining Tokyo's development as a result of just one historical path that is not a uniquely Japanese or Asian, but could have resulted in a Western city given different urban and political constraints. The small footprint of each establishment lowers start up costs and risks, allowing them to serve as incubators for young restauranteurs. This approach was adopted out of harsh necessity, but the resulting neighborhoods have a striking charm: intimate townscapes with exceptional vitality and livability, featuring a fine-grained urban fabric comprised of numerous small buildings.

The spaces under elevated railways were initially occupied by black markets after the war but the authorities (like in the case of Ameyoko Shotengai) regularised these by working with the railway companies to offer micro-lots to vendors under the tracks. Yokochos have a unique management structure - each lot is owned by an individual proprietor and the alleys are not public land but shared private property among all the landowners and maintained by them.

This book demystifies Tokyo's emergent urbanism for an international audience, explaining its origins, its place in today's Tokyo, and its role in the Tokyo of tomorrow.

Compared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings.