Tokyo: An Urban Portrait
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Tokyo's seemingly endless sea of buildings has grown incrementally over the past centuries, leading to an urban condition that is both coherent and contradictory at the same time. The understanding of Tokyo as a continuous and interdependent urban complex is a much-neglected perspective in previous readings of the city. An attachment to the land, strong civic commitment, and a deep appreciation of the immaterial has produced a nested megastructure of smaller communities. These places have all evolved in a related way, briefly and temporarily disrupted by earthquakes and a devastating war. Over time, a set of distinct urban patterns emerged through centralisation processes, the "manshon urbanisation", the relocation of various types of manufacturing, and other developments. What might appear homogeneous in composition and rhythm is in fact a configuration of distinctly different spaces, created by the routines of everyday life that make the district of Shinjuku different from Shimokitazawa or Kitamoto.
This book not only provides the first comprehensive reading of the many urbanisation processes shaping Tokyo today, but also seeks an entirely new approach for looking at megacity regions: through their differences, and the way those differences are produced in the course of everyday life.
Naomi Hanakata is an architect, urban designer, and urban researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) of the Singapore-ETH Centre. Her research focuses on urbanisation processes in and around megacity regions and their implication on a local and global scale. Her doctoral study looked at the question of differences within the larger metropolitan region of Tokyo. She is interested in socio-spatial processes, which contribute to the complex and extensive structure of the contemporary city. She is further engaged in the debate around sustainable future cities with the research project on Thinking Urban Futures (TUF).