little houses crammed in a big city

Dug out of my Instapaper queue was this very relevant article from Japan Times on the hard choices facing the Tokyo Metropolitan Government regarding traditional neighborhood forms. Neighborhoods built on the Edo street grid and in older shitamachi form, that is, densely clustered wooden homes, make up about 20 percent of Tokyo's building stock, and these neighborhoods in particular are highly susceptible to fire, earthquakes, and other disasters. The narrow, crooked streets make access by emergency vehicles difficult or impossible, and older buildings are exponentially more likely to collapse or burn.

The Japan Times article highlights how Japanese land-use laws are particularly ill-suited to modernizing these neighborhoods for better emergency response - eminent domain is largely out of the question, so the TMG enforces new setback laws when buildings are demolished or significantly altered. Since these changes have the effect of making already small lots even smaller, they perversely decentivize replacement of older buildings or even rehabilitation.

The law effectively acts as a disincentive for rebuilding, since most applicable plots are small to begin with. Homeowners can renovate or remodel their dwellings, but if they rebuild they may have to make the houses even smaller. The situation is even stricter for a house that is not along a road, but is simply boxed in by other houses. Those are designated as saikenchiku-fuka meaning structures that can't be rebuilt at all. Consequently, these properties aren't replaced, and the structures remain fire hazards. In November, a wooden apartment building in the Okubo district burned down, killing four residents. The structure was 50 years old and, due to its inaccessibility, it was designated as a saikenchiku-fuka. Firefighters couldn't reach it.

The set-back/saikenchiku-fuka law may prove to be the main obstacle to Tokyo's redevelopment plan. Property is a complex issue, especially in these densely populated neighborhoods where it isn't always clear who owns what and where one plot ends and another starts.

The article makes reference to Sumida, where we toured with the Mukojima machizukuri and witnessed firsthand the glacial widening of streets there. As New York City planners fond of density and narrow streets, the newly widened roads appeared much more sterile and uninviting than the traditional streets, and our gut instinct was that these traiditional forms should be preserved. However, knowing that Tokyo is about 98% likely to have a direct, major earthquake in the next 30 years, these neighborhoods will be the site of tragedy if nothing is done.

Can tradition and emergency planning coexist in areas like this?

tokyo sprawl

The Tokyo region experienced massive growth during the twentieth century, and Okata and Murayama explore some of the consequences of rapid expansion without strong planning. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government did not enact strong planning laws until the 1960's, and even afterward development was haphazard and very often under served by urban infrastructure. It's important to recall that while sprawl poses a large problem for Tokyo, the framework of sprawl used by North American planners should not be employed. 

Most new construction was transit-oriented development - Tokyo's new suburbs were largely not populated by automobile commuters. And unlike the United States, Tokyo (and Japan overall) is currently undergoing a rapid retraction as the population begins to shrink and younger people move closer to the inner city. This puts pressure on the older single family homes in the inner wards to develop high-rise manshons which strain the already thin layer of infrastructure and open space of the neighborhood.

This type of vertical sprawl (for lack of a better term) appeared to pose a significant issue for inner-city Tokyo residents, as neighborhood groups found themselves ill-equipped to take on the real-estate industry. Battles over new developments go beyond simple NIMBY-ism, as lax planning laws and recent deregulation allowed for construction that was not only out of scale, but which would definitively change the neighborhood's population and living conditions. This, at least, seemed clear from Fuji, Okata, and Sorenson's study.

While these new high-rise developments are disruptive, it appears that the problem stems from these issues of lax planning in the past. It is because development occurs lot-by-lot and that new neighborhoods were built almost informally that we see these conflicts today. It is because neighborhoods are so under served by open space and other community facilities that an influx of young residents may be a concern. 

I liked Okata and Murayama's conclusion to their work:

Mixed use and vibrant looking vernacular urban places, often praised by European and American planners and urban designers, are merely incidental results of market economy and loose land use/building regulations and are actually vulnerable in many ways.

So while the Tokyo Metropolitan Government appears to be ahead of the national government in planning issues, neighborhoods in Tokyo will continue to be subject to the whims of the real estate industry. I'll try to suppress my own USA-centric understandings of planning while I'm in Tokyo, but these readings gave me the impression that planning as a profession has its work cut out for it in Japan.

location as experience

While I found myself disagreeing with much of Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs (it appears to come at the beginning of the height of Western fascination with the "Japanese Way"), I very much enjoyed the essay.

In particular, I was interested Barthes' notion that Tokyo resists printed interpretation, instead relying on orientation on the ground and continual experience. Just coming off of the fantastic Seeing Like a State, I wonder about how a large city, the capital of a wealthy and highly organized country, could resist the simplifying and codifying that one would expect to take place during periods of intense modernization. I imagine that the Japanese state has devised its own, less obvious system of control and information gathering that serves its needs in this city. I'm inclined to believe that the apparent chaos of a "city without addresses" is a superficial gloss on what is in reality a well organized system.

All the same, it does appear that neighborhoods in Tokyo support and rely on local expertise, and this quotation from the essay captured my imagination:

The inhabitants excel in these impromptu drawings, where we see being sketched, right on the scrap of paper, a street, an apartment house, a canal, a railroad line, a shop sign, making the exchange of addresses into a delicate communication in which a life of the body, an art of the graphic gesture recurs: it is always enjoyable to watch someone write, all the more so to watch someone draw: from each occasion when someone has given me an address in this way, I retain the gesture of my interlocutor reversing his pencil to rub out, with the eraser at its other end, the excessive curve of an avenue, the intersection of a viaduct...

one structure, one lot

Despite the small lots, the houses are invariably detached and line up side-by-side with a narrow gap between them. In Japan, this is due to an ordinance stipulating that only one structure can be built on a lot, and a civil law that requires the exterior wall to be set 0.5 meters back from the edge of the lot. Though the size of the houses is the same in a subdivision, there is a vast range of subtly different colors and shapes. Hiroshi Naito has described this type of landscape as "spineless," but a subdivision that has done its utmost to express its individuality within plots of land of the same size is indicative of the fact that an egalitarian civil society and a functioning democracy exist in Japan. Yet, at the same time, within this standardized community, people remain divided and isolated.

from Tokyo Metabolizing