Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. . . . Ankyostreets (chapter 5) are found on top of the many former watercourses that once dissected Tokyo’s topography and which have been covered and turned into paths and roads, often hastily during the post-war period. They provide an ambiguous space, that is, they are not strictly necessary for adjacent tenants to access their properties and can thus turn into a ‘new realm for everyday life’ (p. 143). They also improve the city’s walkability and build in redundancy, offering spaces for experimentation. Does this form dominate because of its intrinsic advantages or because land use institutions favored it? Several times, you describe these neighborhoods as a “delicate balance”, but it seems to me they’re more of a hardy weed.

So, I find it’s a pretty – you get a huge mix, between it’s the guy living up above his shop, versus renting it out to younger folks. But it’s definitely skewing more towards the renting out over time for elderly homeowners. Simply because a lot of them are not necessarily wanting to run a small niche business with no profit in their golden years. I mean, some do, of course, all the mom and pop ramen places. Grandma making her bento boxes and selling them out front for office workers and stuff like that. And I love that. But their kids don’t necessarily want to take it over. Flexible zoning and building regulations allowed for mixed and adaptive (re-)use of urban spaces but limited vertical expansion with some exceptions. A vibrant and decentralised small-scale manufacturing sector – the essential but often overlooked labour-intensive side of the Japanese economic miracle – anchored well-paying jobs to local neighbourhoods. A set of ‘generic’ neighbourhood features sprang up organically as the city expanded, for example, public baths, restaurants and small retail, the latter being protected by law from the competition of big business.Emergent Tokyo is technical as well as winsome. This is just one of several panels showing uses, parking, street widths, and entrance patterns in a single neighborhood. Jeffrey: Each chapter of the book covers a different style of Tokyo neighborhood and offers lessons which can be learned by observing those different types of neighborhoods, and these lessons range from, like we were talking about, before placemaking issues, like usage of greenery, or how signage is done to sort of bigger, more abstract matters. Like, thinking about generating agglomeration economies. And these lessons that are put forward, they’re from particular types of neighborhoods, but they’re sort of presented in a sort of general way where you could broadly apply those lessons to relatively similar types of neighborhoods or places elsewhere. But at that point, as a starting point, that’s more of a special economic zone than a city. What makes a city, what makes the city this living, breathing, ecosystem or organism, which I like that way of thinking about on multiple levels, because if you design your city right or if your city turns out right, it will be like a resilient organism. 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 ]

Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely. So, something that I think is kind of come out of our conversation, and one of the examples that makes me think when you talked about the proof of parking policies and the restrictions on the street parking and all of these kinds of things. It doesn’t seem like there’s an expectation among the residents of Tokyo that you kind of get to live your life externality free, in the sense that in American cities, there’s seems to be kind of a, I’m going to have my cake and eat it too attitude, where any sort of policies that would sort of force you to sort of internalize the social costs of your actions is extremely opposed. There’s no great way – as far as I can tell, right? There’s no great wave of opposition to say the proof of parking policies, maybe not. 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. 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. 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.

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So, that’s something where I think it’s if we can think kind of as a more about the cohesive whole, how we’re creating an urban environment that allows for community and serendipity, and discovery and the feelings of belonging, and that emotional color palette, especially for people unlike ourselves, or who are in different social strata, or different communities, you name it. That can allow for a more organic design than simply saying, we have determined scientifically that parks are good, and therefore you need these many parks per square miles or per thousand people. That kind of algorithmic formula. Different contexts can produce very different kinds of equilibriums. I’m not an econ person, but I if I vaguely recall correctly, the idea of like Nash equilibria. The idea that there can be multiple stable equilibria, rather than a single best equilibrium point. I’m probably completely butchering that concept, but that’s kind of where I’m going with this.

The parts of Tokyo that feel the most Tokyo-esque and beloved are not the parts of the city that were designed from the top down, for the most part, to be that way.”— @McReynoldsJoe [0:07:54 ]So, can you explain what you mean by these different forms? What the current dynamics of these competing urban isms, if you will, how that’s playing out? 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. Jeffrey: That’s awesome. I think it is very cool that you’re able to arrive at that point without, okay, yeah, you spent years as an urban planner or something, and then moved into that. But it was this sort of – like you talk about in the book, this idea of sort of an emergent urbanism in Tokyo, emergent expertise, almost, if you will. 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.

Besides being a clearly articulated manifesto for those trying to preserve Tokyo’s emergent properties,Emergent Tokyohelps distill lessons for other cities." —Urban Studies 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. . . .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? 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 – Salim Furth: In the first chapter, you draw a sharp distinction between “chaos” and “emergence”. Why is emergence a better concept than chaos for understanding Tokyo? 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. 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.