Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

Product Information

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. The book, by architects Jorge Almazán , Joe McReynolds and their colleagues at Keio University’s Studiolab, serves as a field guide for outsiders, providing the historical context and vocabulary for understanding some of Tokyo’s iconic neighborhoods. It includes stunning images, from photographs of neighborhoods to detailed diagrams, that explain how Tokyo’s vernacular architecture serves its residents. The authors apply urban activist Jane Jacobs’ insights about successful city neighborhoods to Tokyo, showing how many of its neighborhood typologies help promote safety, intimacy and an enticing pedestrian environment.

But zooming out, maybe to a little bit more of a macro view, and sort of thinking about the work. We’re doing with Charter Cities, let’s say one of our partners comes to you and says, “I’m building a city and it’s in Nigeria, or Zambia, or Honduras or somewhere else.” I understand that these places are not the same for a variety of reasons with economics, politics, and everything else as Tokyo. But what should I know from the experience of Tokyo? I’ve always been fascinated by subcultures and the way that subcultures work differently in different cities and parts of the world. So, Ephemerisle is great for that. But another interesting thing about Ephemerisle is the different islands of Ephemerisle set different rules for themselves. That’s actually led to a very soft micro form of competitive governance where people with boats or floating platforms or things like that will join the island that most closely mirrors the rules that they want to live under for that week or two weeks or however long they’re out there.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. Yokocho spaces are small enough to allow fringe entrepreneurs – in this case, a Greek immigrant – a place for commercial expression

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.

In Nonbei Yokocho the valuable land under the bars is held collectively and managed through a trust. The fragmented ownership and low overhead costs help facilitate economies not of scale, but of agglomeration, with rows of idiosyncratic spaces that feel personal, informal and intimate. Despite their small size, the bars offer plenty to drink—and plenty for other cities to ponder. ■ 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. Jorge Almazán: “Emergence” is a property of “complex systems,” which are distinct “chaotic systems” (See Stephen Wolfram’s work.) Roughly speaking, complex systems’ behavior is not regular, but it isn’t chaotic either. Complex systems have structure, even if it is difficult to define. In this formal sense, cities (including Tokyo) are closer to emergent complex systems than purely chaotic systems. 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.