Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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I feel like Emergent Tokyo dismantled some of my preconceptions of the city and replaced them with practical knowledge of how it came to be, how it operates and where it might be heading, as well as what the world can learn from it. His office, Jorge Almazán Architects, is committed to environmentally responsible and socially inclusive projects spanning from interiors and architecture to urban and community design. 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.

His professional practice in Japan includes award-winning community spaces as provocative public space interventions.

zakkyo buildings achieve their vertical density by opening directly onto the street…when they cluster together they not only preserve pedestrian laneways but strengthen their central, connective role in public life". His office, Jorge Almazan Architects, is committed to environmentally responsible and socially inclusive projects spanning from interiors and architecture to urban and community design. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. 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. For cities around the globe mired in crisis and seeking new models for the future, Tokyo’s success at balancing between massive growth and local communal life poses a challenge: can we design other cities to emulate its best qualities?

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. I found it very helpful how Almazan traced various elements of Tokyo’s urban environment back to their origins and showed how they evolved over time. 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. 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 zooms into the zakkyo of Yasukuni Ave, near Shinjuku Station, Kagurazaka Street in Shinjuku Ward, and the Karasumori zakkyo block in Shimbashi.Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive.

The data-driven analysis and clustering of architectural districts was very interesting, and the numerous diagrams were highly illuminating. Neither was it expressly anti-corporate, despite examining the potential threats to community life in Tokyo presented by commercial redevelopment. For the moment, I want to speak about those of Dani Rodrik, the well-known professor at Harvard's School of Government. I've been so often frustrated by the tension between wanting cities to densify and build more and how "soulless" new development usually end up feeling. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, he obtained his PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.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. We also see the vast differences between corporate-led Tokyo and Emergent Tokyo and how they each play out and their influence on the people and places around them. 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".

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. Golden Gai landowners have faced pressures from developers to sell up so that the plots can be consolidated but in 1986, some bar owners banded together to protect their interests. Compared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings. 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. As the Japanese government attempted to rebuild their devastated capital city, they initially drafted a comprehensive plan, but soon concluded that they lacked the budget to carry it out.Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world’s cities. Whether you are someone who is interested in urban design, or you just love visiting Tokyo, this book has something for you. 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. Sprinkled with excellent diagrams and illustrations, the book is a fascinating analysis written in a readable way, without too much overly-academic dryness.