Emergent Tokyo - by Jorge Almazán & Joe McReynolds & Naoki Saito (Paperback)

About the Book

"Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Com­pared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo s inner workings."--

Book Synopsis

Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Com-pared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings. 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?

Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets. Tokyo at its best offers a new vision for a human-scale urban ecosystem, where ordinary residents can shape their own envi-ronment in ways large and small, and communities take on a life of their own beyond government master planning and corporate profit-seeking. As Tokyoites ourselves, we uncover how five key features of Tokyo's cityscape--yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, flowing ankyo streets, and dense low-rise neighborhoods--enable this 'emergent' urban-ism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up.

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. Visitors to Japan, architects, and urban policy practitioners alike will come away with a fresh understanding of the world's premier megacity--and a practical guide for how to bring Tokyo-style intimacy, adaptability, and spontaneity to other cities around the world.

Review Quotes

"Besides being a clearly articulated manifesto for those trying to preserve Tokyo's emergent properties, Emergent Tokyo helps distill lessons for other cities." --Urban Studies

"Here the authors bring us to a new way of understanding Tokyo, reading the metropolis much as we would a European city: a product of historical conditions, which can be highlighted, analyzed and replicated. And so, with the five patterns as guides, "Emergent Tokyo" is a detailed plan to reproduce and mimic the conditions for organic growth: the conditions for an emergent city." --The Japan Times

"..."Emergent Tokyo" is a must-read for city lovers who want to learn more about Tokyo. " --Discourse

"For Almazan, the lesson of these "emergent" Tokyo spaces isn't that architects and urban planners elsewhere can simply drop them down in the middle of their cities. Rather, it is that design professionals should allow healthy cities to develop in the directions toward which they are trending naturally, acting more like midwives than surgeons." --Architectural Record

"If you read one book about Japan this year, it should be the beautiful, new Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazan and his Studiolab colleagues, including Joe McReynolds. --Market Urbanism