Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. 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. Any westerner in Tokyo ends up asking the 'how have they managed to make a megalopolis of 37 million so nice?

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. On undertrack infills, these sprang up under the elevated sections of railway tracks, raised up to avoid competing with vehicular traffic at crossings under the national policy of "grade separation". I can't evaluate the quality of this book's content, as the type size on my copy was so small that, for the first time in my long-time reading experience, the book (in paperback, at least) proved impossible to read. Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. The authors have broken up the city of Tokyo into six major categories, Village, Local, Pocket, Mercantile, Yamanote Mercantile and Shitamachi Mercantile.These neighborhoods were not initially planned, per se—they emerged, and their ramshackle, spontaneous spirit can still be felt today when walking Tokyo’s backstreets. Quand les auteurs tentent de dresser le portrait des tendances actuelles, ils sont obnubilés par la vision manichéenne du corporatisme contre les forces émergentes. England has a wealth of surviving houses from past centuries, be they country mansions or rustic framed cottages, and the circumstances of the age are often reflected in the interiors. 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. Finally, on dense, low-rise neighbourhoods, the authors highlight that notwithstanding the stereotypical image of Tokyo as this neon-lit metropolis of ultra-modern buildings, the city is actually home to numerous intimate, highly-communal residential neighbourhoods.

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. The waterways are trying to provide something to us even as we have done our best to cover them up and forget about them.

For the moment, I want to speak about those of Dani Rodrik, the well-known professor at Harvard's School of Government. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. 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.

Emergent Tokyo looks at 3 sites: the Mozart-Brahms Lane in Harajuku (near Takeshita Street); Yoyogi Lane and the Kuhonbutsu Promenade near the suburban station of Jiyugaoka. This book does its best to destroy so many of those clichés and stereotypes that the vast majority of foreigners make about the streets of Tokyo. Emergent Tokyo zooms into the zakkyo of Yasukuni Ave, near Shinjuku Station, Kagurazaka Street in Shinjuku Ward, and the Karasumori zakkyo block in Shimbashi. It's a little bit skeptical of corporate development which may sound a bit suspicious to western YIMBYs but I think it makes a lot more sense in the context of Tokyo. A unique look at Tokyo from architectural and commercial communities' and (briefly) historical perspectives.I recently read a very interesting book on urban planning (or lack of planning) in Tokyo, entitled Emergent Tokyo.

I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative. Like yokocho alleyways, the authors argue that zakkyo buildings offer a prime urban location for relatively small establishments. This is an incredible book for anybody interested in urbanism, and particularly in how localized, small scale patterns of urban development have emerged in Tokyo that define the city and make it what it is. The side of the paper is colored slightly to indicate the graphic sections, making it easy to navigate between chapters or to just skim the pretty diagrams if that's what you want. This answers it instead via fine-grained urban history and good, clear diagrams, performing a major service in the process.It look into six Tokyo urban design patterns, how they evolved, the experience they foster and how they are threatened by corporate development. Critical urbanism that rejects Japanese cultural exceptionalism, but centres on the lessons that arise from Tokyo and how they can be applied to other cities. It talks about how light city planning and decentralized market forces produce the delightful lived environment of Tokyo.