The young whippersnappers are coming to appreciate the old guys’ craftsmanship and heritage and everything. And the old guys are appreciating, like, “Well, maybe they’ve got tattoos or weird fashions, and they don’t necessarily look like my kind of people at first glance, but they got heart. My kid didn’t take over the family business. He’s working an office job somewhere and doesn’t come home as much as I’d like.” The unexpected inheritors of a legacy is kind of the intergenerational story in a lot of these old-school neighborhoods, and I find that fascinating and wonderful. Kidokoro T, Fukuda R, Sho K (2022) Gentrification in Tokyo: Formation of the Tokyo West Creative Industry Cluster. International Journal for Urban and Regional Research46(6): 1055–1077. Crossref; Google Scholar 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. 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?

Walking through these neighborhoods, it’s not just a series of houses that have no relation to you. It’s all these old little mom and pop businesses, and some of them are owned by the old folks living upstairs. Some of them are young people coming in who just want to try a little project with cheap rent. And the old guy who owns the house upstairs, he’s just happy to have some nice young kids around trying things, versus being old and bored. He is the research editor and coauthor of our main topic of conversation today, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. He is also the lead editor and coauthor of China’s Evolving Military Strategy, and the forthcoming book, China’s Information Warfare. We have a wide-ranging conversation on the emergent nature of Tokyo urbanism and urbanism more generally, as well as on China’s military capabilities and the potential for conflict over Taiwan. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for listening. For example, an island I worked with, we had a fully – we had a lot of people coming in to visit from a lot of places and party and stuff like that. So, we had a fully written out enthusiastic consent policy that people had to read and understand and get a little wristband, that proof that they read and understood it, before coming aboard our island. Whereas another island, it might be that during the rest of the year, they all know each other, they’re all in community with each other. So, they have strong community norms. They don’t see the purpose of that sort of thing. And so, they’re more casual about it, and people can decide where they want to link up with. That competitive governance aspect of seasteading and charter cities, it’s like yours different, but it’s also the closest thing I can think of in my immediate vicinity of people experimenting with that. Joe: Yeah, so funny, you should ask that since actually, I’m working with a think tank on a major research project on what China is and is not learning from the Ukraine conflict. And that’ll hopefully be out sometime later this year, especially once we can see how the conflict ultimately plays out. So, see what China’s taking away. A clearly articulated manifesto for those trying to preserve Tokyo’s emergent properties, Emergent Tokyo helps distil lessons for other cities”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 Joe: Yeah, it’s a lemon economy, I think is the term. But these days, Tokyo, or Japanese building standards, I should say, have gotten so high, and there are these government incentives for what they call 100-year homes, homes built to last 100 years, that it may no longer be the case going forward, that it’s just the bulk of the value is in either land and not the house and your house is a depreciating asset. And so, what if modern construction in Tokyo, what if it starts to be an appreciating asset, like so much American housing has been in cities and things. And if the economics start to look more like housing in the rest of the world, and this is something where, for a long time, a lot of kind of more orientalist writers about Japan, they would talk about how it’s – well, in Japan, you buy a used house, you’re inhabiting the sins and the tragedies of the previous owner. What is your street layout going to be that both serves the needs of industry and creates feelings of intimacy as you walk through a neighborhood, intimacy, but also openness to people coming in? All of these questions have possible answers and I could give you a half dozen possible answers to each of those questions, and some of them would probably mutually contradict each other. There are multiple ways to skin this cat. But it has to be part of the thinking early on, or then it’s just a total roll of the dice. And given how – basically, given the how much we know about how to be economically efficient, and designing special economic zones and things like that. How many case studies we have of SEZs and everything. In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. . . .

Joe: Yeah. Well, let me tell you another one for Tokyo that really makes a huge difference is Shintoism, not necessarily as a religion, but as a practice, I’m a non-theistic Jew, shall we say. I’m Jewish, but like I’m more cultural Jewish. I’m not on my knees praying to God. Shintoism is pretty relatable to me and how it’s often practiced in Tokyo because the Shinto, the little shrines, especially the portable shrines in different neighborhoods of Tokyo, there are all sorts of festivals where the portable shrine you got to get for usually men, not always, but usually in men with decent, semi decent muscle to them to lift this portable shrine on there four shoulders and kind of carry it around to represent the neighborhood in the local festival or things like that. Jeffrey: One additional question on some of these earlier points. You mentioned how in some of these residential areas and sort of these classic alleyway neighborhoods, the little shops and commercial spaces. Do you have an idea of, is most of that owner occupied or rented? Did you have a sense of what that split looks like? I’ve always been fascinated by subcultures and the way that subcultures work differently in different cities and parts of the world. So, Ephemerisle is great for that. But another interesting thing about Ephemerisle is the different islands of Ephemerisle set different rules for themselves. That’s actually led to a very soft micro form of competitive governance where people with boats or floating platforms or things like that will join the island that most closely mirrors the rules that they want to live under for that week or two weeks or however long they’re out there. The book, by architects Jorge Almazán , Joe McReynolds and their colleagues at Keio University’s Studiolab, serves as a field guide for outsiders, providing the historical context and vocabulary for understanding some of Tokyo’s iconic neighborhoods. It includes stunning images, from photographs of neighborhoods to detailed diagrams, that explain how Tokyo’s vernacular architecture serves its residents. The authors apply urban activist Jane Jacobs’ insights about successful city neighborhoods to Tokyo, showing how many of its neighborhood typologies help promote safety, intimacy and an enticing pedestrian environment.We find a tale of problems encountered, opportunities taken and lessons learned. We also see the vast differences between corporate-led Tokyo and Emergent Tokyo and how they each play out and their influence on the people and places around them. The flip side of that, also, is that for I think the average American who’s a homeowner, their home is basically their primary retirement savings account. Their main store of value. So, you get just an incredible sense of threatening their home appreciation, you’re threatening their plan for how they sustain themselves for the rest of their life oftentimes. So, it’s this environment that lends itself to zero sum thinking and thinking from a place of scarcity or deprivation, which is not always a terrible place. And just the fact that Tokyo and this is the great thing about a rail city because Tokyo is hyper suburban. A lot of people don’t realize this. Tokyo’s daytime population is a fraction of its nighttime population. Tokyo is very suburban, but they’re railway suburbs, rather than automobile suburbs and that makes all the difference in the world. In terms of computer development patterns, you name it.

Jeffrey: I agree. Absolutely. I think that’s what makes these urban discussions are one of the most s interesting spaces to participate in. Let’s talk about sort of one of these tensions, maybe, with a concrete example. One of those sort of policy tools that you mentioned, that could maybe have some use in sort of helping to preserve, maybe preserve isn’t the right word. Maybe that can be a charged word in urbanists circles. How is emergent urbanism sustained in Tokyo from sort of a policy perspective? One of the examples that I’m thinking of that I think, sort of brings out these factions or this tension, if you will.Jeffrey: It’s kind of cool to all the people who are sort of connected to that competitive governance, professionally in some way, find a way to make it play out even if just for fun. In progressive cities we are maybe too critical of private initiative,” said Christian Dimmer, an urban studies professor at Waseda University and a longtime Tokyo resident. “I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative.” But at that point, as a starting point, that’s more of a special economic zone than a city. What makes a city, what makes the city this living, breathing, ecosystem or organism, which I like that way of thinking about on multiple levels, because if you design your city right or if your city turns out right, it will be like a resilient organism.

They contrast these older development patterns with the “corporate urbanism” of new high-rise developments. The latter have proliferated since the enactment in 2002 of Japan’s Law on Special Measures for Urban Renaissance, which aims to encourage redevelopment by permitting private developers to build taller buildings in exchange for providing public plazas and green space. Relative to older Tokyo neighborhoods, Almazán and McReynolds argue that these high-rise developments are less welcoming to nonresidents than older Tokyo neighborhoods, and that they facilitate less mixing between income groups. a valuable demonstration of permeable, inclusive, and adaptive urban patterns that required neither extensive master planning nor corporate urbanism to develop. These urban patterns are emergent: that is, they are the combined result of numerous modifications and appropriations of space by small agents interacting within a broader socio-economic ecosystem. Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world’s cities. Within Japan,] the relative attractiveness of Tokyo has decreased due to the recent wave of large-scale redevelopments, and there is a search for alternatives. Our book is a call to pay attention to the value of Tokyo’s own vernacular urbanism. Emergent Tokyo” is a valuable addition to what it calls “Tokyology”. Mr Almazán and his team use a mix of number-crunching, shoe-leather reporting and lush images to explain how and why the city works. Municipal data help illuminate recurring features, from the teeming yokocho alleyways to the neon-signed buildings known as zakkyo. The authors attribute Tokyo’s success to prosaic policy choices rather than an abstract national essence. The eclectic façades of the zakkyo, for example, result not from a Japanese disregard for exteriors, as commentators once argued, but the fact that ordinances apply to each building independently. Owners are not required to blend in with other buildings, as is often the case in Western cities.

So, you get this vibrant, intimate, walkable urbanism that’s attractive to everyone. That to me, is a model that in America, everyone would say, “Of course, what about the parking?” But if you can set aside the parking part for a second, that’s your thing. Parking is – there’s no free parking basically, in all of Tokyo. You’re either paying an absurd amount of money to park somewhere, or if you have a parking space on your property, which is rare. You have to prove to a car dealership that you have a place to park your car before you are allowed to buy that car. So, it’s just not designed with cars in mind.