Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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But what wasn't quite clear to me was how strata titled malls in places like Singapore - where individual units are owned by different owners rather than a single landlord - has led to the opposite outcome where unit owners have traditionally underinvested in common facilities. Visitors to Japan, architects, and urban policy practitioners alike will come away with a fresh understanding of the world's premier megacity - and a practical guide for how to bring Tokyo-style intimacy, adaptability, and spontaneity to other cities around the world. Despite these attempts to portray the Japanese as a harmonious and homogeneous people since time immemorial, the idea of Japan as a homogeneous nation is actually a relatively recent development. Emergent Tokyo seeks to unpack the conditions - the interplay between buildings, infrastructure, local culture and practices, legal codes and ground up responses to these conditions - that led to Tokyo's unique cityscape.

It explains various aspects of the Georgian and Regency house and provides a comprehensive guide to the houses of this period. Emergent Tokyo features three undertrack infill sites: Ameyoko Shotengai under the elevated JR lines between Ueno and Okachimachi Stations, the undertrack infills at Koenji Station on the Chuo Line and the Ginza Corridor, a 12m deep and 420m long undertrack area in the Ginza district. And so, in areas where neither the government nor the country’s real-estate and transportation mega-corporations could properly fund reconstruction efforts, whole neighborhoods instead rapidly rebuilt themselves. These urban patterns are emergent: that is, they are the combined result of numerous modifications and appropriations of space by small agents interacting within a broader socio-economic ecosystem.Really great analysis, with a lot of ideas and suggestions that anybody can advocate for in their own cities. This answers it instead via fine-grained urban history and good, clear diagrams, performing a major service in the process.

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. The authors have broken up the city of Tokyo into six major categories, Village, Local, Pocket, Mercantile, Yamanote Mercantile and Shitamachi Mercantile.Overall, it was fascinating learning about Tokyo's urban development context - how Japan's system of strong property rights has made it challenging for real estate developers to do large scale redevelopment; it was only with the 2002 Law on Special Measures for Urban Renaissance, which designated specific areas of the city as special zones where existing urban regulations were suspended, that developers could negotiate case-by-case deals with local government officials to redevelop these parts of the city. For instance, "the system [in yokochos] allows owners and managers to customise their spaces, invest in them as a long term project, and get involved in decision-making affecting the yokocho as a whole. Tokyo at its best offers a new vision for a human-scale urban ecosystem, where ordinary residents can shape their own envi­ronment in ways large and small, and communities take on a life of their own beyond government master planning and corporate profit-seeking. Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets.