Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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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. 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.

So, you get this vibrant, intimate, walkable urbanism that’s attractive to everyone. That to me, is a model that in America, everyone would say, “Of course, what about the parking?” But if you can set aside the parking part for a second, that’s your thing. Parking is – there’s no free parking basically, in all of Tokyo. You’re either paying an absurd amount of money to park somewhere, or if you have a parking space on your property, which is rare. You have to prove to a car dealership that you have a place to park your car before you are allowed to buy that car. So, it’s just not designed with cars in mind.

The virtues of disorder

One big, big reason for that was that earthquake standards, safety standards, building processes, and things like that have historically been like leaps and bounds in each generation. And so, an old house is considered an unsafe house, in a place where everything is, not everything. But a lot of things are heavily defined by preparation for the next disaster in memory of previous disasters. Japan gets a lot of natural disasters. That’s starting to change, though, as at this point, Japanese building standards are among really the very highest in the world. I should also mention that also, if your expectation is that whoever buys your house is going to tear it down and build a new one, then you’re not going to invest a ton in costly maintenance and remodeling and things like that, for the most part. Then, you get into, it’s not just an old house, it’s an old, and likely, poorly maintained house. Waley P (2013) Penciling Tokyo into the map of neoliberal urbanism. Cities32: 43–50. Crossref; Google Scholar 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. 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. Within Japan,] the relative attractiveness of Tokyo has decreased due to the recent wave of large-scale redevelopments, and there is a search for alternatives. Our book is a call to pay attention to the value of Tokyo’s own vernacular urbanism.

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. 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. At a more popular level, “chaos” is always mentioned when talking about Tokyo, especially outside Japan. “Chaos theory” was popularized among architects in the late 1980s, and it allowed Japanese architects to see Tokyo in a more positive light. But this narrative of chaos is a dead-end. It left many architects without critical tools to analyze the city and charter a vision for the future. Netflix has a charming Japanese TV series called Midnight Diner, which shows a tiny bar similar to those discussed in this book.Besides being a clearly articulated manifesto for those trying to preserve Tokyo’s emergent properties, Emergent Tokyohelps distil lessons for other cities. Arguably, these are most relevant to developing (mega-)cities given that the Tokyo model’s main features came about during the post-war developmental state period. For more developed cities, particularly in East Asia, Tokyo offers a cautionary tale as a ‘post-growth’ city, where punctual growth in one area must arithmetically come at the expense of that in another, and where an egalitarian urbanism is gradually replaced by the dictates of oligopolistic markets. Jeffrey: One additional note on this for our listeners, something I thought of, where Joe talked about, there’s sort of this color palette, if you will, of different sort of types of communities and urban forms, and all of these things, listeners might find interesting. A good ongoing case study in this, Scott Beyer from the Market Urbanism Report, is in the middle of a world tour, world cities tour. He’s hitting sort of every continent and cities in how many countries, but a lot of them principally in the global south. Joe: Yeah, that’s the one key thing, I think, is that a lot of these questions like far and neighborhood preservation, and things like that, redevelopment, they take on such a different tenor, when we’re talking in an environment of scarcity, especially housing scarcity. It doesn’t feel like there are enough places for people to live, and so housing costs are spiraling, and everyone is trying to claw their way to an acceptable life and seeing other groups in the city as in conflict with their ability to do that.

Finally, on dense, low-rise neighbourhoods, the authors highlight that notwithstanding the stereotypical image of Tokyo as this neon-lit metropolis of ultra-modern buildings, the city is actually home to numerous intimate, highly-communal residential neighbourhoods. In particular, they examine the suburban neighbourhood of Higashi-Nakanobu in Shinagawa Ward, the historically planned district of Tsukishima in Chuo Ward and the north end of Shirokane. Jeffrey: It’s kind of cool to all the people who are sort of connected to that competitive governance, professionally in some way, find a way to make it play out even if just for fun.

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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. Joe: Yeah, it’s a lemon economy, I think is the term. But these days, Tokyo, or Japanese building standards, I should say, have gotten so high, and there are these government incentives for what they call 100-year homes, homes built to last 100 years, that it may no longer be the case going forward, that it’s just the bulk of the value is in either land and not the house and your house is a depreciating asset. And so, what if modern construction in Tokyo, what if it starts to be an appreciating asset, like so much American housing has been in cities and things. And if the economics start to look more like housing in the rest of the world, and this is something where, for a long time, a lot of kind of more orientalist writers about Japan, they would talk about how it’s – well, in Japan, you buy a used house, you’re inhabiting the sins and the tragedies of the previous owner. Joe: Yeah. Why is the libertarian approach or the doctrinaire libertarian answer to this urban problem? Why is it working poorly in this respect in Tokyo? You can also talk about the other areas in which it’s working quite well. You have mega corps, dividing the transit and suburban development between them, and in ways that actually, overall work pretty effectively, for example. But that’s one thing that I’ve found can be a positive in the book, is I found – I’ve done talks before audiences that were a mix of like leftist and libertarians, but all very invested in good faith in livable cities beyond just their own personal profit incentive as safe as a developer or something like that. And really, talking about a city outside of our daily experience here in America, that has lessons for both sides, I think really enables a lot of good faith interactions between spheres of research and academia and activism that don’t always interact with each other.

Jeffrey: Yes, that’s a good point. I found that your discussion of greenery in the book really fascinating, especially since that most of the urban greenery in Tokyo is informal in nature. It’s a person or a business, putting some plants out on the curb or whatever. Tokyo seems to have successfully resisted the kind of useless, really, wide-open green space brain worms that have colonized planning in the US and elsewhere. Culture probably plays a role here, with people sort of maintaining gardens historically, and that kind of thing. But is this also sort of a function of the pervasiveness of small lot sizes? What else is maybe going on here that keeps greenery this way? The flip side of that, also, is that for I think the average American who’s a homeowner, their home is basically their primary retirement savings account. Their main store of value. So, you get just an incredible sense of threatening their home appreciation, you’re threatening their plan for how they sustain themselves for the rest of their life oftentimes. So, it’s this environment that lends itself to zero sum thinking and thinking from a place of scarcity or deprivation, which is not always a terrible place. And just the fact that Tokyo and this is the great thing about a rail city because Tokyo is hyper suburban. A lot of people don’t realize this. Tokyo’s daytime population is a fraction of its nighttime population. Tokyo is very suburban, but they’re railway suburbs, rather than automobile suburbs and that makes all the difference in the world. In terms of computer development patterns, you name it. 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. . . . Joe: Sure. Though, depending on the questions, I may tell you, I can’t speak about X, Y and Z, because of my day job. But sure. Jeffrey: I agree. Absolutely. I think that’s what makes these urban discussions are one of the most s interesting spaces to participate in. Let’s talk about sort of one of these tensions, maybe, with a concrete example. One of those sort of policy tools that you mentioned, that could maybe have some use in sort of helping to preserve, maybe preserve isn’t the right word. Maybe that can be a charged word in urbanists circles. How is emergent urbanism sustained in Tokyo from sort of a policy perspective? One of the examples that I’m thinking of that I think, sort of brings out these factions or this tension, if you will.

What, then, are the salient features of Tokyo’s ‘emergent urbanism’? The authors mainly define it by what it is not, that is, corporate-led urbanism that has benefited vastly from significant deregulation and planning delegation to private actors, as evident in the ‘sleek yet generic super-high-rise towers placed on top of shopping-mall-like commercial podia, all without a hint of serendipity or idiosyncrasy’ (p. 207). In stark contrast, Tokyo’s small neighbourhoods are ‘filled with a multiplicity of independent owners and operators, economies of agglomeration, small-scale architecture, urban spaces that are physically and socially permeable, interconnected networks rather than top-down hierarchies, and bottom-up incremental growth rather than corporate development’ (p. 216). Tokyo lives in many urbanists’ minds as a series of stereotypes—clean, efficient, neon-lit. A new book, “ Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City ,” delves beneath these stereotypes, while distilling lessons from Tokyo’s diverse commercial and residential communities and making them accessible to an English-speaking audience. Despite these attempts to portray the Japanese as a harmonious and homogeneous people since time immemorial, the idea of Japan as a homogeneous nation is actually a relatively recent development. Ironically, the dominant ideology in early 20th-century Japan explicitly held that Japan was a multi-cultural society originating from a melting pot of various Asian ethnicities—which, according to imperialists at the time, gave Japan the intrinsic capacity to incorporate other nations into the Japanese Empire. A clearly articulated manifesto for those trying to preserve Tokyo's emergent properties, Emergent Tokyo helps distil lessons for other 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. ■