Almazán, Jorge and Studiolab. Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2022.

Reviewed by Eric Häusler

Emergent Tokyo is the result of the collaborative effort of Studiolab, an architecture studio at Keio University that combines interdisciplinary research with socially conscious architectural practice. Emergent Tokyo’s authors argue that Tokyo is a vibrant and livable city and that its development offers an aspirational concept for urbanists and cities across the globe. What exactly is a “city”? What characterizes a thriving city? How do cities develop? Can cities be planned? And which lessons can be drawn from the Tokyo experience? The ways in which Jorge Almazán and his team answer these questions render this publication a thoroughly rewarding read for urbanists from all disciplines, including urban historians.[1]

The complex city: Tokyo “inspires the world.”[2] Although the authors aspire to analyze the city on its terms, Emergent Tokyo offers far-reaching insights into more general questions beyond the scope of its immediate research subject—most fundamentally: What constitutes a city?

From the outset, the existence of several different Tokyos is acknowledged. The city’s distinct neighborhoods give it its shape. For centuries, Tokyoites have distinguished between the yamanote or “high city” and the shitamachi or “low city.” Seen through the “neighborhood-lens,” the well-known transportation hubs, such as Shibuya or Shinjuku, often designated as subcenters by urban planning, offer another approach to capturing the city. Administrative units such as the twenty-three special wards that comprise the city’s urban core represent another possibility.

The authors decide to go several steps further. Using the “more concrete, modern lens” of data science and the wealth of quantitative information provided by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, they create an intriguing visual representation of the city.[3] A map of distinct neighborhood models or archetypes across the twenty-three wards identifies essential characteristics on the level of different chōme (an administrative unit or ‘mini town’ that averages 0.2 square kilometers, or roughly ten Manhattan blocks in size).[4] The six archetypes—Village Tokyo, Local Tokyo, Pocket Tokyo, Mercantile Tokyo, Mass Residential Tokyo, and Office Tower Tokyo—are spread across the map, resembling the fabric of a colorful Roman mosaic. Geographic proximity to neighboring spaces does not explain the archetypes’ distribution. This mosaic representation of Tokyo is complemented by a closer analytical look at “its residents’ everyday reality.”[5]

The main empirical parts of the book, chapters two to six, describe five ideal-typical urban patterns, each exemplified by three case studies: yokochō alleyways (micro-bar clusters representing third places beyond home and work, Shinjuku’s Golden Gai being the most famous one); zakkyo buildings (multitenant buildings containing a mixture of offices and businesses located in proximity to important transportation hubs and clad in advertisements for the vertically segmented businesses); undertrack infills; ankyo streets (watercourses-turned-streets, literally “dark canal”); and dense low-rise neighborhoods (population densities of 20,000 persons per square kilometer and buildings up to three stories). Each chapter opens with a representative double-page photo and includes a map showing the locations of the respective patterns within the twenty-three wards. Illustrations, maps, and photographs visually support the corresponding case studies. A “learning from…” section concludes each chapter. More on this later.

By addressing these various layers—six neighborhood archetypes identified on the chōme-level, five urban patterns defined by their built environment and daily use, and fifteen case studies exemplifying these urban patterns—Tokyo becomes a stunningly complex yet comprehensible city.[6]

The spontaneous city: “Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive.” The blurb on the back cover of the book summarizes the authors’ positive attitude toward Tokyo. As Tokyoites themselves, the authors clearly enjoy living in the city and are convinced that Tokyo contains many of the elements that make a city attractive.

How they define thriving and successful cities can be derived from their descriptions of Tokyo throughout the book: a variety of inclusive and adaptive urban spaces; a cityscape shaped in ways big and small by the daily micro-scale choices and actions of its residents; unique patterns and urban ecosystems taking on a life of their own beyond the limitations of government master planning and corporate profit-seeking; a city of intimacy, resilience and dynamism built from the bottom up by its ordinary citizens; organic places with a unique character distinct from other global cities; residential life at a human scale; a sense of anything-can-happen; a dynamic and intimate feeling at a human scale; a wide variety of distinctive, beloved neighborhoods; a strong sense of cohesive identity; a resilient urban fabric; a local sense of place; a Tokyo-esque adaptability and spontaneity. In sum, Tokyo has the ingredients that form a spontaneous city.

The numerous positive characteristics that the authors attribute to Tokyo need to next be transformed into a more stringent list of urban success factors. Notably, the authors do not ignore negative aspects of Tokyo’s urbanization—especially those related to the corporate-led urbanism or neoliberal urbanism that has impacted the city’s development since the 1980s. They are also aware of attempts to transform Tokyo into a mystical place. The authors distance themselves from any form of (self-)orientalization while still aiming to create a new critical approach to Tokyo.[7]

The emergent city: Most urbanists would agree that Tokyo’s positive characteristics represent worthwhile goals for cities worldwide. The distinction between achievements or success stories and goals or promising urban planning concepts is not always clear, which makes matters more complex. This leads us to the following question: Can a city be planned?

Based on this sweeping and detailed Tokyo study, the answer is no. In Tokyo and elsewhere, the top-down approach of mid-twentieth-century modernist urban planners and architects collapsed. After that, unregulated market forces across the globe contribute to generic, sterile, and exclusionary cities. In part to counter this trend, the current generation of urbanists advocate for inhabitant-driven new ideas and dynamic thinking.

From a longer historical perspective, the often necessity-driven, citizen-led, small-scale redevelopment of the postwar city explains, to some degree, Tokyo’s successful urban growth. The bundling of meager resources led to dense low-rise neighborhoods. The former black markets located next to transit hubs evolved into yokochō. The efforts to “modernize” Tokyo in preparation for the 1964 Olympics led to ankyo streets. “The combined effect of all these small-scale transformations has created a cityscape with an unparalleled degree of adaptability and spontaneity.” This assessment highlights the strength of small-scale solutions and stresses the importance of history and the (positive) effects of path dependency. Serendipity and idiosyncrasy have left positive imprints on Tokyo’s cityscape. However, this does not mean that the clichéd image of chaos “still dominant today in the global imagination” helps understand the city’s urbanization.[8]

The authors’ view of Tokyo strongly supports the concept of emergence, “the spontaneous creation of order and functionality from the bottom-up . . . Through emergence, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”[9] This certainly is true for Emergent Tokyo—the book and the city it describes.[10]

Lessons to be drawn: The Tokyo model of emergent urbanism offers an innovative analytical view of Tokyo and a convincing explanation of the city’s success. Beyond this, the chosen methodological approach identifies lessons to be drawn for other cities: “we can discover not only how to build a better future for Tokyo, but also how to export the lessons of Tokyo to the world.” As the authors note, no serious urbanist would ever attempt to describe life in New York City by the experience of visiting Times Square alone. Instead, if one is interested in representative, everyday experiences of residents, the search needs to be radically extended. Most likely a multitude of lived urban experiences will emerge that need to be categorized, analyzed, and translated into more abstract categories that allow for comparisons.[11]

The fifteen case studies at the heart of Emergent Tokyo exemplify the core urban patterns that make up the Tokyo model. Though already discussed at length it bears mentioning once more that in addition to textual analysis, every case is brought to life vividly with the help of thoughtful illustrations of site-specific characteristics, maps, and photos. Based on these detailed case studies, the authors provide lessons that urbanists worldwide can draw upon: “Tokyo’s underlying design principles have allowed this complex and seemingly disorderly metropolis to produce lively, wildly diverse, inclusive, and innovative urban spaces. If given the chance, they could breathe new life into other cities around the world.”[12] Design principles or heuristics supporting promising—emergent—development of urban spaces and resulting in vibrant, livable, spontaneous cities include:

• Foster communication and character through smallness.
• Keep things informal and low profile to create a sense of belonging.
• Create space that can host numerous independent owners and operators.
• Build resilient and creative communities setting free economies of agglomeration (the co-location of similar or complementary offerings).
• Let experimentation and innovation produce emergent identities.
• Build vertical public spaces that connect with their surroundings.
• Create active edges.
• Embrace the clustered possibilities of dynamic facades.
• Leave room for organic growth and connect to the surrounding urban context.
• Concentrate, don’t centralize.
• Instead of cannibalizing the local economy, encourage the buildup of clusters.
• Pay attention to the active edges of infill spaces.
• Use ambiguous spaces to allow for the creation of active edges.
• Augment the city’s walkability with emergent greenways.
• Foster emergent character through disruptions to the cityscape.
• Build in redundancies to nurture the freedom to experiment.
• Use gap spaces to offer visual permeability and adaptability.
• Encourage dispersed small greenery.
• Structure shared spaces to naturally prioritize pedestrians and bicycles.
• Use diverse street types to create smooth transitions from public to private spaces.
• Foster a sense of collective safety via street-side doors and windows.
• Allow for varied building types and uses, even in the most residential areas.[13]

In conclusion, the book advocates a new and innovative paradigm for a consciously designed emergent urbanism. The new mantra for urban planners? Give numerous owners and operators the power to decide on the shape of urban spaces. Bring to bear economies of agglomeration. Scale down the scope of planning activities and allow the local community to shape them. Create boundaries that are permeable and foster inclusiveness. Rely on the evolution of the preexisting urban fabric and incremental growth to lead to new and promising configurations.[14] Emergent Tokyo challenges urbanists from all disciplines to “think creatively about how these conditions for emergence can be created in other contexts,” while reminding us that debates about possible urban futures necessarily constitute “battlefields full of controversies and radically opposed forces”.[15]

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Eric Häusler is a historian with a keen interest in social science concepts. His current research project compares how citizens, social movements, architects, urban planners, and politicians imagined urban futures in Tokyo and New York in the 1960s. Extended research stays have taken him to Sophia University and the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo and, presently, to New York University and The New School in New York City. His most recent book publication is How Cities Become Brands: Developing City Brands Purposefully and Thoughtfully.

Featured image (at top): View of Shinjuku’s skyline from the West. Photograph by Thomas Gittel, Ways to Japan.

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[1] A twenty-four-member research team supported the editorial team of Jorge Almazán, Joe McReynolds, and Naoki Saito.

[2] Jorge Almazán + Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2023), 4.

[3] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 7.

[4] Chōme often correspond with topographical features and capture Tokyo’s organic socio-spatial development.

[5] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 8, 15.

[6] Emergent Tokyo focuses on the twenty-three special wards of Tokyo. All fifteen selected case studies are at most fifteen kilometers away from Tokyo Station. Extending the analysis to more distant parts of the Tokyo metropolis or neighboring prefectures would promise further insights regarding urban sprawl, suburbanization, and the interactions between the urban core and the world’s most populous metropolitan area.

[7] Tokyo is characterized as neither an exotic mystery nor a uniquely Japanese city. Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 204, 206.

[8] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 15, 206.

[9] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 16, 17.

[10] For example, the “Tokyology” in chapter 7 offers a chronological overview of thinking about Tokyo that adds another layer to the city’s multifaceted analysis. This “thumbing-through” video gives a good impression of the beautifully designed book.

[11] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 14, 15.

[12] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 217.

[13] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 34-35, 78-79, 110-111, 142-143, 180-181.

[14] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 213-215.

[15] Almazán, Emergent Tokyo, 14, 217.