The minute and the colossal follow one another and clash in a powerful energetic flow that knows no rest, while tangled strips of infrastructure wind between buildings in spectacular spatial combinations. All is bathed in a hazy, dim light, which rarely brightens, and permeates every interstice of the city, from window to window, sign to sign and corner to corner. At night, artificial lighting transforms Tokyo into a fantastical apparition of artificial mountain ranges that glow like braziers. The visual trauma is due to Tokyo giving no sense of any recognizable structure. Compare with Europe, or the West in general, where cities still have a perceptive — albeit residual and fragmentary — urban form which is always based on a more or less rational order, in Tokyo you find a randomness in which every urban rule is overturned or negated. Or at least so it seems. As a matter of face, once initial impressions have been overcome, you begin to notice the presence of recurring threads in the urban fabric, first on a subliminal level, than more consciously; a fabric made of multiple, fractal agglomerates of settlements. These agglomerates are groups in self-similar masses, suggesting urban spaces which are not defined by clearly scaled hierarchies or distinct morphological types. Here, urban spatiality seems to feature the unplanned coexistence of architectural units and the incidental contiguity or what is small and large, simple immaterial — rhythm beats over everything, constituting an amazing unifying element in its almost hypnotic repetition of the same model. In this sense you discover that in the end Tokyo is a simple city that is different from European and American cities only because urban planning is practically absent. If the former are cities of space, governed by the laws of perspective, then Tokyo is a city of situations…in Asia’s greatest city you are completely disoriented from the start.
That is in a good book called Tokyo: City and Architecture. I am struck by how much the Tokyo Metro and underground corridors are in fact the defining parts of the city and the most memorable destinations.
It is not randomness or lack of urban planning that defines Tokyo, which has a great deal of
urban planning, in fact. It is its sheer size. There are many great cities as multi-centered
and apparently random as Tokyo, which are also substantially defined by their underground metro
subway systems. Think of London.
On the matter of sheer size, I was once told in person by the Minister of Housing for the Greater
Tokyo metro area that the true population of it is 40 million, although I have never seen that
figure in print anywhere.
As for fractality of its urban design or structure, that is also not unique to Tokyo and has
been argued for nearly 20 years to be a fundamental feature appearing in many cities. For an
early reference see Michael Batty, Paul A. Longley, and A Steward Fotheringham, “Urban Growth and
Form: Scaling, Fractal Geometry, and Diffusion-Limited Aggregation,” Environment and Planning A,
1989, 21, 1447-1472.
The visual trauma is due to Tokyo giving no sense of any recognizable structure. Compare with Europe, or the West in general, where cities still have a perceptive — albeit residual and fragmentary — urban form which is always based on a more or less rational order, in Tokyo you find a randomness in which every urban rule is overturned or negated.
Although the author of the excerpt you quote walks this back a bit, I think it’s pretty transparently wrong on its face too — compare Tokyo with a city like, say LA. Or even London, for that matter. In the central 23 wards, the JR Yamanote-sen (and the Marunouchi-sen) provide a superficial sort of organisation — a vast loop encircling the heart of the city. Around its periphery, you pass by all the familiar and famous neighbourhoods: the Imperial Palace and Tokyo Station, Ueno Park, Akihabara, Shibuya, Harajuku and the Meiji Shrine, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, the Tokyo Dome. But these stops aren’t just isolated stops — they fit together like the neighbourhoods of Manhattan, only swollen to immense size. You can walk from Ueno to Akihabara almost entirely through the Ameyoko market, underneath the train tracks. From Shinjuku, you can make your way directly to the Imperial Palace, just walking along Shinjuku-doori. This takes you to the back of the palace grounds. Ikebukuro links to Shinjuku not only by the metro, but by Meiji-doori as well. Shibuya’s park, to the north, links to the wood around the Meiji Shrine, and then to Harajuku, which in turn brings you to Aoyama by way of Omotesando. There’s a pattern and an organisation there that’s not the result of monuments and avenues, but of neighbourhoods flowing one into another.
Even when you reach out to the western districts of Tokyo — like Kichijouji or Mitama — the sense of organisation and unity is rather greater than you find with the suburbs of Western cities, like New York or LA. There are secondary and tertiary city centres there in western Tokyo (like Kichijouji, in fact), linked into the fabric of the neighbourhoods around them, rather than set off in vast fortress malls ringed by parking lots, or strip malls by the side of the road.
True, there is a sense in which you can find — perhaps “randomly,” or unexpectedly — little shopping districts at every turn. In Chiyoda-ku, alongside the offices and the high court and the Otani hotel, and the Diet building, there are little side streets with tiny shops and restaurants and so on by them. But you get this in the best of the old cities, in London, and even in New York. Because people have to eat lunch.
As experienced from the ground, to be frank, I don’t think I’ve been in a city that holds together quite as well as Tokyo. If we are to look for a recognisable structure, wouldn’t it be, quite simply, that the city is anchored by the Imperial Palace, the Meiji Shrine, and Shinjuku? Almost everything else (at least that I’m interested in, within the 23-ku) stands in some relation to these focal points, though you may sometimes have to approach sideways.
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