Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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A clearly articulated manifesto for those trying to preserve Tokyo’s emergent properties, Emergent Tokyo helps distil lessons for other cities” There’s been a lot in the past year, I think, written about sort of what Taiwan can learn from Ukraine’s experience and their ongoing war with Russia, sort of, given the David and Goliath dynamics. What, if anything, is China learning from Russia’s experience in that war? How much really relevant learning for China? Is there a given sort of the different geography, economics, politics, objectives, and so on? 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?

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 The young folks moving into a neighborhood, their initial thing might be like, “Well, getting involved with the local neighborhood council and that stuff, that’s kind of the old people thing. Yeah, I’m living here, but I got my whole city boy life across the city and stuff. I’m not mister neighborhood.” But the old guys, “Well, we need some young folks to carry the shrine for the festival.” And then there the young folks will be like, “Okay, yeah, yeah, sure. I’ll carry the shrine for the festival. That’s fun.” And the old folks are like, “Ah, gotcha. That’s how I started when I was in my 20s, 30s. I thought I’m too cool for this.” And next thing you know, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, could you volunteer for this one thing?” And, “Yeah, sure.” 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. 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. Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world's cities.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. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area. . . . Jeffrey: Yeah, I think this is great advice, and I think we may have found a new little addendum project to the urban planning guidelines that we published last year for charter city developers, that tries to get at this kind of emergence phenomenon, that tries to operationalize that. So, I think I just found some more work for Heba, our resident urban researcher. 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.

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.

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They contrast these older development patterns with the “corporate urbanism” of new high-rise developments. The latter have proliferated since the enactment in 2002 of Japan’s Law on Special Measures for Urban Renaissance, which aims to encourage redevelopment by permitting private developers to build taller buildings in exchange for providing public plazas and green space. Relative to older Tokyo neighborhoods, Almazán and McReynolds argue that these high-rise developments are less welcoming to nonresidents than older Tokyo neighborhoods, and that they facilitate less mixing between income groups.

Salim Furth: You and your colleagues are releasing a Japanese language edition later this year. How does the book serve Japanese and foreign audiences differently?Joe: Yeah. It’s summer camp for weird Silicon Valley nerds. And as a weird DC/ New York/Tokyo nerd, I like flying in for it and having a weird nerd summit with the other weird nerds. Joe: Yeah, so funny, you should ask that since actually, I’m working with a think tank on a major research project on what China is and is not learning from the Ukraine conflict. And that’ll hopefully be out sometime later this year, especially once we can see how the conflict ultimately plays out. So, see what China’s taking away. I’ve always been fascinated by cities. One of the things I realized as I traveled around the world was that different cities working differently enabled very different modes of living.”— @McReynoldsJoe [0:02:11 ] Waley P (2013) Penciling Tokyo into the map of neoliberal urbanism. Cities32: 43–50. Crossref; Google Scholar