Tectonics of the Spontaneous City: Transcultural Survey on Tokyo as an Alternative to Corporate Urbanism

Can the city be designed? After the failure of the Modernist dreams of total urban planning, and under the dominance of an increasingly neoliberal regime, the city as a collective project has been gradually abandoned to the so-called market forces. In the face of the negative consequences of this abandonment, the relevance of architecture and urbanism needs to be claimed. Architects and urbanists need to provide again their synthetic capacity to shape the built environment according to a self-conscious collective project. This project cannot be based on old totalitarian techniques. A new inventory of orders, efficiencies and aesthetics need to be found and developed. The urban fabric of contemporary Tokyo can be a source of case studies, since it provides examples of porous, inclusive and adaptive urban patterns that are neither the result of master planning nor the consequence of corporate urbanism. These patterns are emergent: the combined result of multiple modifications and appropriations by small agents interacting in a dynamic process, which as a whole create an integrated urban pattern. We examine five of these patterns: zakkyo streets, yokocho, undertrack infills, metropolitan villages, and flowing streets. Unlike much of the discussions on Tokyo that emphasize its cultural uniqueness, we aim at transcultural validity.