Tokyo boasts punctual public transport, safe neighbourhoods, clean streets and more Michelin star restaurants than anywhere else
stood up from the flatlands—the chimneys of bath-houses, heavy house safes and an occasional stout building with heavy iron shutters,” wrote Russell Brines, the first foreign journalist to enter Tokyo after the second world war. From a pre-war population of 7m people, only 3.5m were left. As Tokyo rebuilt, the city was rife with violence and slum-like living conditions.
It offers lessons to developing cities elsewhere. In 1950, 30% of the world’s population was urban; by 2050, 68% will be. Much remaining growth will be in megacities of more than 10m in Asia and Africa. There are 33 such cities now; by 2030 there will be 43. As Tokyo grapples with what to do when cities age and shrink, it can also serve as a case study for other rich cities.
Around those hubs grew dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods. That was the planning “failure”. After the war, city planners sought to impose zoning as in the West, as they had after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. But the government’s resources were too limited and Tokyo’s growth too rapid to control the process. Japan instead developed lax zoning codes, which allow pretty much anything to be built, rather than prescribing what is permitted.
What once were problems now seem virtues. “[Mixed-use neighbourhoods] have proved very resilient,” says Murayama Akito at the University of Tokyo. Consider the work of Jane Jacobs, an American urbanist who railed against planning in the 1960s. “Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos,” she wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”“On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.
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