Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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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". 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.

I’m already a believer in small-scale, bottom-up urbanism, but I still appreciated learning how these qualities have contributed to and enriched many Tokyo neighborhoods. The author favors bottom-up emergent urban space development versus corporate uniformity with limited public space. I also enjoyed the section on undertrack infills, and I wish cities in the US would incorporate these. Com­pared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo’s inner workings. I highly recommend the book to people interested in urban design—the graphics are especially well done.Emergent Tokyo notes that yokocho had their beginnings as temporary black markets that emerged in the post war period, which gradually transformed to bars for snacks and drinks from the late 1940s. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Not claiming to be comprehensive, the focus is five structural community types: (1) tight alleyways, (2) zakkyo (tall, narrow, multi-purpose buildings with plentiful signage, (3) under-rail track phenomena, (4) ankyo (covered river streets), and (5) dense, low-rise neighborhoods. 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.

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. Emergent Tokyo argues that the regulatory system in place that allows for small, fragmented ownership, rather than privileging large developers, has created the conditions for diversity, resilience and community.As Tokyoites ourselves, we uncover how five key features of Tokyo’s cityscape—yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods—enable this ‘emergent’ urban­ism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up. 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.

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. The data-driven analysis and clustering of architectural districts was very interesting, and the numerous diagrams were highly illuminating. Unlike many of the discussions on Tokyo that emphasise cultural uniqueness, this book aims at transcultural validity, with a focus on empirical analysis of the spatial and social conditions that allow these patterns to emerge.This book is a treasure trove of information about how these neighborhoods have evolved over decades.

As Tokyoites ourselves, we uncover how five key features of Tokyo's cityscape - yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods - enable this 'emergent' urbanism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up. It's been hard for me to articulate why new development feels "soulless" and what it takes to give a city "soul", but I've always felt that Tokyo certainly had it. The book gives terrific historical context for these developments, and by diving deeply into several examples of each pattern provides really interesting background of how they arose. The alleys and unplanned common areas those give rise to result in a true "neighborhood" feel, unbroken by large car-oriented roads or high-rise apartments. While viaducts can disrupt the urban fabric, in Tokyo, undertrack infills have helped to stitch together the urban fabric.Some cities, like Singapore and Vienna, have bucked the trend by using public money to build affordable housing.