Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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What is your street layout going to be that both serves the needs of industry and creates feelings of intimacy as you walk through a neighborhood, intimacy, but also openness to people coming in? All of these questions have possible answers and I could give you a half dozen possible answers to each of those questions, and some of them would probably mutually contradict each other. There are multiple ways to skin this cat. But it has to be part of the thinking early on, or then it’s just a total roll of the dice. And given how – basically, given the how much we know about how to be economically efficient, and designing special economic zones and things like that. How many case studies we have of SEZs and everything. Salim Furth: Some of the spaces in Emergent Tokyo benefit from well-placed trees or potted plants. Those are almost always delightful in a city, but there’s a tension between providing space and sunlight for plants and allowing for narrow passages and tall buildings. In the U.S., the Garden City movement’s love of greenery has led to a lot of dead, oversized urban spaces. What can we learn from Tokyo about including trees in small spaces?

Flexible zoning and building regulations allowed for mixed and adaptive (re-)use of urban spaces but limited vertical expansion with some exceptions. A vibrant and decentralised small-scale manufacturing sector – the essential but often overlooked labour-intensive side of the Japanese economic miracle – anchored well-paying jobs to local neighbourhoods. A set of ‘generic’ neighbourhood features sprang up organically as the city expanded, for example, public baths, restaurants and small retail, the latter being protected by law from the competition of big business. Walking through these neighborhoods, it’s not just a series of houses that have no relation to you. It’s all these old little mom and pop businesses, and some of them are owned by the old folks living upstairs. Some of them are young people coming in who just want to try a little project with cheap rent. And the old guy who owns the house upstairs, he’s just happy to have some nice young kids around trying things, versus being old and bored. Jeffrey: Yeah, that is really interesting, especially since I think we’ve seen like a just insane decline in intergenerational interactions across the board, at least in the United States. I think it’s cool, how the sort of built environment and sort of keeps those kinds of interactions alive. But zooming out, maybe to a little bit more of a macro view, and sort of thinking about the work. We’re doing with Charter Cities, let’s say one of our partners comes to you and says, “I’m building a city and it’s in Nigeria, or Zambia, or Honduras or somewhere else.” I understand that these places are not the same for a variety of reasons with economics, politics, and everything else as Tokyo. But what should I know from the experience of Tokyo?Yokocho offer small, low cost commercial spaces. Image Credit: Douglas Paul Perkins/Widimedia Commons So, can you explain what you mean by these different forms? What the current dynamics of these competing urban isms, if you will, how that’s playing out? It is a way to signify a commitment to embellish the neighborhood and express the individual personality of the homeowner. Some use a Victorian style with many flowers, some use bonsai and other Japanese elements, and some cover the whole building with ivy. Recently I see many Mediterranean greenery, even olive trees, and very often potted herbs for cooking. Jeffrey: Yep. I think that’s a great point. I want to change gears a little bit. So, we’ve sort of been talking about things more so maybe on, maybe call it a planning level, but we haven’t really touched on elements maybe of what you might call placemaking.

Joe: It’s something I found fascinating more broadly, in Tokyo is, it matters so much what type of landlord you have. I find this true in Tokyo, in New York. Are you your own landlord? Or are you renting from a random individual or a small local landlord operation? Or are you a line on a spreadsheet to a large corporate landlord operation? It just makes all the difference in the world, because if you’re lying on a spreadsheet, there’s always going to be that pressure in corporations tend to maximize profit. So, there’s always going to be that pressure to maximize the numbers on that spreadsheet and to push spaces towards their most economically efficient usage. Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely. So, something that I think is kind of come out of our conversation, and one of the examples that makes me think when you talked about the proof of parking policies and the restrictions on the street parking and all of these kinds of things. It doesn’t seem like there’s an expectation among the residents of Tokyo that you kind of get to live your life externality free, in the sense that in American cities, there’s seems to be kind of a, I’m going to have my cake and eat it too attitude, where any sort of policies that would sort of force you to sort of internalize the social costs of your actions is extremely opposed. There’s no great way – as far as I can tell, right? There’s no great wave of opposition to say the proof of parking policies, maybe not. Yokocho spaces are small enough to allow fringe entrepreneurs – in this case, a Greek immigrant – a place for commercial expression Tokyo lives in many urbanists’ minds as a series of stereotypes—clean, efficient, neon-lit. A new book, “ Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City ,” delves beneath these stereotypes, while distilling lessons from Tokyo’s diverse commercial and residential communities and making them accessible to an English-speaking audience. That’s kind of a digression. But I think it’s important to note, and this is something where my weird experience with Japan really helps, because I think a lot of people, they come to Japan, and their only impression of engaging with Japanese people, if they don’t speak Japanese, their only impression of engaging Japanese people is the very sort of English speaking, globalist well to do Tokyo cohort, whether in customer service or in business, or things like that. That’s like, if you have no experience of America, and your entire understanding of what Americans are like, is you stayed with John Kerry’s extended family, and it’s all like Boston Brahmins or something like that.Joe: Yeah. Well, let me tell you another one for Tokyo that really makes a huge difference is Shintoism, not necessarily as a religion, but as a practice, I’m a non-theistic Jew, shall we say. I’m Jewish, but like I’m more cultural Jewish. I’m not on my knees praying to God. Shintoism is pretty relatable to me and how it’s often practiced in Tokyo because the Shinto, the little shrines, especially the portable shrines in different neighborhoods of Tokyo, there are all sorts of festivals where the portable shrine you got to get for usually men, not always, but usually in men with decent, semi decent muscle to them to lift this portable shrine on there four shoulders and kind of carry it around to represent the neighborhood in the local festival or things like that. Take Nonbei Yokocho, or Drunkard’s Alley, a charmingly defiant cluster of watering holes in the shadow of Shibuya railway station. The average size of the 38 establishments is just under five square metres, notes “Emergent Tokyo”, a new book by Jorge Almazán, an architect, and his colleagues at Keio University. They nominate Tokyo as a model of a liveable megacity and explore its workings—and in so doing show how perceptions of it have evolved.

Jeffrey: It’s kind of cool to all the people who are sort of connected to that competitive governance, professionally in some way, find a way to make it play out even if just for fun. Waley P (2013) Penciling Tokyo into the map of neoliberal urbanism. Cities32: 43–50. Crossref; Google ScholarHere the authors bring us to a new way of understanding Tokyo, reading the metropolis much as we would a European city: a product of historical conditions, which can be highlighted, analyzed and replicated. And so, with the five patterns as guides, “Emergent Tokyo” is a detailed plan to reproduce and mimic the conditions for organic growth: the conditions for an emergent city." —The Japan Times