Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

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It's a little bit skeptical of corporate development which may sound a bit suspicious to western YIMBYs but I think it makes a lot more sense in the context of Tokyo.

It explained aspects of Tokyo's history and discussed its potential future without any sense of nostalgia or alarmism. This approach was adopted out of harsh necessity, but the resulting neighborhoods have a striking charm: intimate townscapes with exceptional vitality and livability, featuring a fine-grained urban fabric comprised of numerous small buildings. 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. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, he obtained his PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Emergent Tokyo seeks to unpack the conditions - the interplay between buildings, infrastructure, local culture and practices, legal codes and ground up responses to these conditions - that led to Tokyo's unique cityscape.It is interesting to see the evolution of the many districts and how they have morphed into their various, current states. The author favors bottom-up emergent urban space development versus corporate uniformity with limited public space. I recently read a very interesting book on urban planning (or lack of planning) in Tokyo, entitled Emergent Tokyo. The waterways are trying to provide something to us even as we have done our best to cover them up and forget about them.

Golden Gai landowners have faced pressures from developers to sell up so that the plots can be consolidated but in 1986, some bar owners banded together to protect their interests. His office, Jorge Almazán Architects, is committed to environmentally responsible and socially inclusive projects spanning from interiors and architecture to urban and community design. For cities around the globe mired in crisis and seeking new models for the future, Tokyo's success at balancing between massive growth and local communal life poses a challenge: can we design other cities to emulate its best qualities?Com­pared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo’s inner workings. I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative. This book demystifies Tokyo’s emergent urbanism for an international audience, explaining its origins, its place in today’s Tokyo, and its role in the Tokyo of tomorrow.