Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous Cityby Jorge Almazan and hisStudiolabcolleagues, including Joe McReynolds. —Market Urbanism Jeffrey: So, to wrap up, you mentioned that your regular participants in Ephemerisle and that was one of your connections, maybe before you even knew it, to sort of charter cities world. So, first, what is Ephemerisle and what’s been your experience with it? And it’s like, yeah, a lot of apartment buildings in New York don’t have a 13 th floor either, yeah. exist. It’s super thin to exist. But money matters. Regulations matter, like incentives matter. Don’t leap towards a cultural essentialist explanation if you can all help it. It’s both lazy, sometimes it’s racist. It’s just not a great way to actually understand what’s going on, or predict the future. Because if you’re looking at it as a cultural essentialist thing, you might be missing these changing –

Joe: First off, you should know to call me. Like any charter cities project, I’m always someone – I describe myself as a little bit pessimistic, on charter cities to you offline, I think, but I’m still interested. And also, I’m someone who wants to be involved and my motive is not particularly financial. I have a lot of thoughts on relatively low-cost ways to make cities of the future, whether they be charter cities, or just evolutions of current cities, more dynamic and livable from what I’ve learned studying Tokyo.Emergent Tokyo” is a valuable addition to what it calls “Tokyology”. Mr Almazán and his team use a mix of number-crunching, shoe-leather reporting and lush images to explain how and why the city works. Municipal data help illuminate recurring features, from the teeming yokocho alleyways to the neon-signed buildings known as zakkyo. The authors attribute Tokyo’s success to prosaic policy choices rather than an abstract national essence. The eclectic façades of the zakkyo, for example, result not from a Japanese disregard for exteriors, as commentators once argued, but the fact that ordinances apply to each building independently. Owners are not required to blend in with other buildings, as is often the case in Western cities. Jorge Almazán: This is not only an American problem. The Modernist obsession with expansive open spaces left many European post-war recent developments with too large and too ill-located parks.

We are joined on the show today by Joe McReynolds, co-author of Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City,and we have an extensive conversation about the characteristics of Tokyo urbanism, the role of policy in the city, lessons that may be applied to charter cities, and also some of Joe’s thoughts on China’s current military capabilities. Joe makes a strong argument for avoiding culturally essentialist understandings of Tokyo, and also plots how the history of Tokyo eschews western understandings of urban planning strategies. We touch on the nature of Tokyo neighborhoods, rental and ownership, greenery and beautification, and much more. To finish off this fascinating chat, we turn to Joe’s interest and involvement in Chinese affairs and reflect on the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on China’s ambitions. So to catch all this and more in this lively and eye-opening chat with Joe, press play! 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.Joe: One thing with that is these zoning policies, with great effort, you can find ways to slightly modify or tweak the national zoning policies at your local level, in some cases. But for the most part, with the zoning policies set at the national level, it makes it so you can’t fight city hall. Whereas in the States, you really can fight city hall and zoning and YIMBYs, especially in an incredibly powerful political force in many cities that YIMBYs are only now starting to catch up to a bit. Joe: Hey, thanks so much. I had an absolutely wonderful time. Hit me up for anything you’re interested in doing collaboration wise, whether that’s real world, charter cities projects, or talking about more on urbanist guidelines with Heba. All of that is totally up my alley. I would love to be a part of it. Excellent categorization of different types of urban areas in Tokyo. Tokyo is unique in its density and public transport and this book conveys how it has historically been achieved in Tokyo. Interestingly, Tokyo achieves many things desired in modern urban planning as espoused by Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl but with patterns that differ from those in other cities. Seeing Tokyo's implementation of various pattterns gives an idea of alternatives to standard ideas and acts as a foil to better understand what's desirable about the dense patterns of, say, Copenhagen. 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.

I mean, the last war China fought was against Vietnam. It’s, at this point, nearly half a century ago, just an utterly different era of warfare. There is a real fear in the Chinese Communist Party that a failed invasion of Taiwan would not only look and be embarrassing, or things like that, that it could lead to the, potentially the fall of the CCP. So, that’s just an incredible risk to take and as we’re seeing with Ukraine, it’s very, very difficult to predict what the outcome will be, and especially in a system centered around a paramount leader, like the way that both China and Russia are centered, largely around Paramount leaders, there can be a real incentive to give an extra rosy picture up the chain, because that’s how you get promoted. That’s how you look good. Which then can make it hard for top level leadership to get an accurate picture of what actually their chances are. Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Com­pared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo’s inner workings. 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? Among the U.S. housing community, Tokyo is best known for its residential affordability . This is due in part to the Japanese system of additive zoning , in which policymakers at the national level have established zoning designations, leaving it to local policymakers to determine where each zoning designation will apply. These zoning designations are intended to uniformly limit land uses with the most nuisances, such as heavy industry, to specified zones while permitting uses that cause little pollution and noise, such as housing and live-work buildings. Even in the most restrictive zone, houses with ground-floor shops or restaurants are permitted, and buildings can be as dense as a floor area ratio of one , meaning that buildings can have the same square footage as their lots—a much more liberal zoning designation than the typical U.S. single-family zone.

Urban Renaissance as Intensification: Building Regulation and the Rescaling of Place Governance in Tokyo’s High-Rise Manshon Boom by André Sorensen, Junichiro Okata, and Sayaka Fujii

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. 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.You look at maps of Tokyo pre and post great Kantō earthquake of 1923, or the firebombing of World War II. These events that just demolished huge swaths of the city. You look at the street maps pre and post and the sections of the city that regroup pretty organically, it’s almost like a lost limb. The maps and usage and pathways and stuff so similar, that’s much more resilient than like, a top down project, like what the Saudis are trying right now, where it’s just we have declared that we will invest to have the best of everything, and it will be a great investment economy. That’s not a city. It could be layered on top of a city concept.