Isn’t this neat? Tokyo is one of the world’s greatest cities, and is regularly praised for its success on a human scale even as the population of the metropolitan area has soared past 30 million. In Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, Jorge Almazan and his team of more than two dozen researchers and editors try to answer crucial questions about the city. What are some of the key features that make Tokyo so vibrant and appealing? How did they come about? Are there underlying patterns? Can these successes be sustained, or maybe even replicated and extended? As they write, “But to use Tokyo as a source of inspiration, one must move beyond the awed gaze of the tourist and begin to ask questions about the why and how of the city. That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of this book.” (p. 4)

The authors also warn throughout the book about just-so stories of the unique Japanese-ness of Tokyo and its development. Cities and cultures the world over have their unique aspects, but people in Tokyo were also responding to economic, legal and environmental challenges that have counterparts elsewhere. The choices that they made began patterns that contributed to Tokyo’s unique character, and path-dependency means that the options in other places will be different. The authors hope that showing underlying mechanisms can both contribute to greater understanding of Tokyo itself and help people, especially decision-makers, grasp the dynamics in their own cities so as to make more human-centric choices. Tokyo’s successes are neither impenetrable nor perfectly reproducible, but understanding how they emerged can make corresponding successes elsewhere more likely.

The bad news is that the answer to almost any question posed about Tokyo begins with, “It’s complicated.” The good news is that with diligent work and thorough research, comprehensible patterns emerge. “Instead of reducing the city’s diversity to a singular Tokyo model, we conceive Tokyo as having multiple neighborhood models or archetypes, each with its own distinct urban fabric—areas which are similar in terms of land use, street patterns, and building types, even if they’re on opposite ends of the city. (p. 7) The team describes their approach:

Tokyo’s metropolitan government now offers a wealth of quantitative information about every building, road, and plot of land in the city, data which can be analyzed algorithmically to lay bare the differences between Tokyo’s diverse neighborhoods. By poring through government databases, we have pinpointed several key characteristics of Tokyo neighborhoods that strongly predict their other contours, enabling us to compare and contrast at the scale of the city in concrete, quantifiable terms. For example, neighborhoods with a similar building scale and mix of land use often resemble each other in subtler metrics as well, such as their permeability to the public, accessibility for pedestrians, and the intimacy and vibrancy of their communities. Through this analysis, one can begin to grasp a common pattern language across Tokyo neighborhoods and gain a sense of how their essential characteristics give them a distinctive tenor and daily rhythm. (p. 7)

The research team took advantage of a long-standing city practice of dividing the city into small administrative units known as chōme. The full city has 23 wards, but within these wards each chōme is only about 0.2 km² in area. By analyzing the city chōme by chōme, the researchers found six major archetypes: Village Tokyo, Local Tokyo, Pocket Tokyo, Mercantile Tokyo, Yamanote Mercantile Tokyo, Shitamachi Mercantile Tokyo, Mass Residential Tokyo and Office Tower Tokyo. The archetypes differ in their density, balance of residential and commercial building, scale of developments, street sizes, and other characteristics. The authors found that neighborhoods of a given type often had more in common with each other than with their immediate geographic neighbors.

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