Continuous urbanization in Japan

I believe a number of factors tell the tale:

* As noted, the zoning laws and general policies surrounding real estate have made it so that residential development keeps with demand. In every developed area, the buildings consistently climb to 8 stories high. I can't speak for Europe but this is something the U.S. simply cannot do within its existing policy regime, now that the automobile suburbs are built out. It's stuck with an escalating price bubble for the foreseeable future.

* The shinkansen itself cannot be underestimated either. Other cities tend to be like "suburbs of Tokyo" in the Japanese model, taking pressure off the city to go supertall.

* Although you can find neighborhoods with large office parks and highways(e.g. Akasaka), the zoning laws permit using your home to do business, which reduces average commutes and requirements for dedicated workspace, and goes a long way to explain the high degree of similarity between any two random urban streets in the country.

* The rail lines are also real estate companies, which creates a virtuous cycle around every transit stop to pile on amenities and maximize the attractiveness of each neighborhood. You have to go quite far out to find "sleepy" train stations.

* The keiretsu business model that built contemporary Japan is likewise intertwined with the transit and development pattern. The economics of the conglomerate dictate that business units should complement and support each other which allows for a certain degree of robustness, further encouraging neighborhoods that have many similar patterns. Even in Sapporo, with it's 19th-century gridded blocks designed by an American, the overall development is distinctly Japanese. U.S. style patterns tend to favor superlative extremes of optimization - the biggest, the fastest, the most profitable - and not average case outcomes. Manhattan may be exceptional simply because we've assumed every city should be exceptional.

It's pretty depressing that Tokyo is kinda the high point of urbanism and even it has so many issues. The bar is set really low for nice cities

Tokyo has many city centers, but I think it fails pretty badly when it comes to office space distribution. There's still concentration of large companies in a couple central areas, meaning everyone is going into a couple spots every morning, and leaving every evening.

There's a big status thing involved where companies want to be in the good neighborhoods so their address tells people that the company's successful. It means that huge swaths of the city are empty during the day. This compounds into lack of as good public services in certain areas, basically creating dreadful suburb communities where there's nothing but housing and convenience stores for miles, and local businesses can't survive on the paltry foot traffic

Meanwhile everyone and their dog is in the same 5 neighborhoods

Tokyo is lucky in that there's permissive zoning, so theoretically this can be corrected. But there's almost no incentive to do so because there's still a lot of prime construction to be had in other parts of the city

The city is going to end up with a bunch of holes in its urban planning because theres not much glory in developing the less popular places

The dark side of the transit network being in place is that there's not as much incentive to ensure local growth. So everything is a 40 minute train ride away.

(To a greater extent the Shinkansen did this for neighboring cities. You can now get to Tokyo in an hour, so there is less pressure to have stuff in your town. People end up getting used to it and moving to Tokyo)

The development permissiveness in Tokyo is amazing. In the US, space under overpasses is wasted, and often becomes desolate and quite scary for pedestrians to traverse. In Tokyo, you’ll see retail built under the overpass.

One factor not mentioned is that Tokyo was almost completely destroyed by bombs and especially by firestorms during World War 2. This required rebuilding much of the city after the war. Cities like New York have never been destroyed. San Francisco was destroyed by earthquake much further back (in 1906 before modern skyscrapers were common). So some of what we see here may be rethinking following destruction as well as other factors.

I've noticed similar in some European cities in terms of an apparent higher average density. I've always attributed it to cities that have existed longer, and that were already significantly more established by the time technology (bicycles, trains, cars) helped people commute further.

In the absence of this technology, I've always assumed people tended to stay more local, which meant that cities ended up a cluster of local communities, rather than one large central district with a large number of commuters.

That said, this seems to conflict with the example of Tokyo, which I understand was significantly rebuilt after the second world war.

This blogpost lays out a pretty convincing case that difference between Japanese and (say) American zoning laws are the main reason for this type of "continuous urbanization" in Japan.

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

London is similar to Tokyo. After the Second World War, Blitzed-out land was bought cheaply by local councils and high-rise, high-density (but generally good quality) housing was built on those sites, hence an uneven spread of high-rise buildings throughout the city. Historically though the tallest buildings had to be church spires and the first true "skyscraper" in London was probably the Post Office Tower (now BT Tower) in Fitzrovia in the 1960s. It now stands pretty isolated as most of the tallest buildings in London are concentrated around the City and Canary Wharf, in the east and east docklands areas.

My understanding was that the actual ground in NYC roughly determined building height. Manhattan was originally a swampy island, so you need to find something hard underneath (bedrock) to build on if you want 50 stories.

> I’m still at a loss as to what caused this dynamic. My best guess is that the city developed alongside a mature, well-supported rail system that could whisk people from one part of the city to another, so the advantage of being in the middle of it all was lower. Manhattan’s subway system could be described in much the same way though, so this answer is not satisfying.

I think the author is correct in saying that it's due to the rail system. The difference between Tokyo and New York is that the Yamanote line runs in a circle, whereas Manhattan's subway lines don't.

The Yamanote line not only connects most of Tokyo's major districts (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza, Ikebukuro, etc.), but it's also the line that connects other train lines together. It's kind of like the beltway/orbital/ring road of a typical American city, just that it's a railway not a freeway. My understanding is that after WW2 when the city was being rebuilt, it was a conscious decision not to define a central neighborhood, and instead have all the lines connect to any station on the Yamanote line instead.

Note that this is not a Japanese thing - Osaka's tall buildings are clustered around Umeda, and Nagoya's are in the area around Shin-Nagoya station. Those cities also don't have a central circle line like the one Tokyo has.

Looking out over Tokyo from one of the city centres (Tokyo is really a prefecture, and a collection of smaller cities), you can see that the other cities look quite built up, and the areas between are the smaller buildings the author is talking about.

I don't think the image provided does it justice, as it just showed a small subsection of Tokyo, and not what the city actually looks like.

No mention to earthquake or typhoons?

I always thought the urbanization of Japan was mostly limited by natural conditions.

Indeed, there is no point in making tall buildings if they are more likely to fall and cost more in repairs and anti-seismic technology

How can the author claim the lack of density in a city such as Tokyo when it has districts like Shibuya or Akiba which you really can't go any more dense without adding stories to the existing building.

Léon Krier is worth mentioning here. He's an architect associated with New Urbanism who also creates illustrations which demonstrate his points well.

For height limits you have the architectural stutter https://www.architectural-review.com/Pictures/web/p/y/l/spee...

San Francisco vs Japan seems very much like monocentric vs polycentric development https://architecturehereandthere.files.wordpress.com/2017/01...

-- and organic expansion through duplication https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5JgoOuUmeDg/WMhJTUWeNWI/AAAAAAAAr...

In this talk here he talks about the classical vs vernacular layout styles https://youtu.be/kFiYL8AvvnY?t=1150