Published in 2/2025 - Housing Reform
A Human-Sized Metropolis
Tokyo can offer valuable lessons on designing on a human scale, embracing the layers of a city, and grass-roots urban development.
Jorge Almazán & Studiolab: Emergent Tokyo – Designing the Spontaneous City. ORO Editions.
223 pages.
What are the lessons that a Western urban designer can learn from a metropolis the size of Tokyo? This is a question that Jorge Almazán and the Studiolab architecture laboratory led by Almazán at Keio University seek to answer in their book Emergent Tokyo, and they manage to do so without falling back on a mystified orientalism. Through a collection of writings and drawings, the authors delve into the themes of a human scale, the layers of a city and grass-roots urban development.
Almazán and Studiolab start the book off by dividing Tokyo into seven archetypes of urban fabric, spanning from high-rise blocks to sleepy suburbs of low-rise dwellings. They demonstrate that the majority of the metropolitan fabric has developed from increasingly densifying village patterns that the metropolitan administration has spliced through with major thoroughfares. It is precisely this small-scale urban fabric and its origins in the grass-roots level that explains the appeal of the city. As an example, the multistorey zakkyo properties built on narrow plots can have as many as nine separate commercial premises crammed on top of each other. These create variety to the streetscape and offer direct access to all of the premises from the street level via a lift, thus avoiding the long, mute and closed-in walls of the modernist shopping malls. Elsewhere in the city, in the yokochō nightlife districts, the floor area of a single restaurant can be a meagre 2.5 by 6 metres on a street with a width of five metres. These intimate eateries originally sprung up in old market places, when the owners of the food stalls were granted permission to build an indoor business space of the same size where their stall used to stand. In these densely-built environments, the huge city assumes a distinctly human scale, unlike in the mega blocks designed in accordance with the modernist tenets, such as in Daiba.
Another significant observation made by the authors concerns the transport infrastructure in Tokyo. Most people living in the metropolis use local trains to move around. In order to avoid clashing with other traffic, the rail operators have elevated large sections of the tracks onto concrete columns. The space beneath the vasculature of rails has been utilised by infilling it with not only transformer stations and parking areas but also small businesses. Here, the tracks that typically serve to separate districts from one another are actually the glue that connects various city districts to each other – the shops on the Ameyoko street introduce a welcome sense of intimacy to the Ginza district with its towering high-rises, while the cluster of restaurants under the tracks in Kōenji creates a link between two quiet residential neighbourhoods. The residents of Tokyo benefit from this arrangement three times over: the tracks connect city districts to each other, the trains offer an easy and convenient mode of transport, and the rental income from the properties under the tracks helps to maintain the rail infrastructure.
utilised by infilling it with small businesses. Here, the tracks that typically
serve to separate districts from one another actually connect them. Photo: Studiolab
Not everything is all sunshine and rainbows even in Tokyo. According to Almazán and Studiolab, the metropolis is under threat by corporate-led urban development. Large corporations are seeking to buy more and more plots, tear down the densely-built small-scale constructions on the properties and replace them with the type of hard-cash megaprojects that are all too familiar to us in the West. These large projects typically entail towers of a dizzying scale that ignore the strengths of the old urban fabric, namely the easy accessibility, diverse cityscape and the human scale, no matter how bright and shiny they may be.
As a Nordic reader, I was often left pondering the seemingly insatiable demand in a metropolis that is implied in the book. Is it possible to transpose all of the phenomena described by Almazán and Studiolab to our less populous cities? Moreover, could such small-scale urban design even be implemented under the stricter regulations of Finland, even if there were enough people to fill the cities? After all, the rights of the landowner are very well-protected in Japan. Finally, and most importantly, can such a dense, chaotic urban space even be designed to begin with – or should it just be allowed to form spontaneously on slightly too small plots by cramming in slightly too many functions on them?
The book works well as a guide to Tokyo, but I can also recommend it to readers who are interested in livening up modernist cities. The tools for creating a city with a human scale are not merely architectural, but the division of land as well as transport and civic participation also play an important role. The book offers refreshingly clear visualizations of the various modes of operation within a city. The maps, axonometric projections and cross-sections that are presented to illustrate the urban spaces and the changes in them are, indeed, the true stars of the book, and I encourage anyone to leaf through the volume if for no other reason than for the impact of the visual communication alone. The images never leave out the most essential part of the city: the human being. ↙
MIKAEL TÓMASSON is a city planner and an AI trainer.