I feel like Emergent Tokyo dismantled some of my preconceptions of the city and replaced them with practical knowledge of how it came to be, how it operates and where it might be heading, as well as what the world can learn from it. I found it very helpful how Almazan traced various elements of Tokyo’s urban environment back to their origins and showed how they evolved over time.

By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area. And so, in areas where neither the government nor the country’s real-estate and transportation mega-corporations could properly fund reconstruction efforts, whole neighborhoods instead rapidly rebuilt themselves. These neighborhoods were not initially planned, per se—they emerged, and their ramshackle, spontaneous spirit can still be felt today when walking Tokyo’s backstreets.In progressive cities we are maybe too critical of private initiative,” said Christian Dimmer, an urban studies professor at Waseda University and a longtime Tokyo resident. Tokyo used to be a water city of the likes of Venice, but most of the waterways were covered up (sometimes hastily) over the past century. The authors have broken up the city of Tokyo into six major categories, Village, Local, Pocket, Mercantile, Yamanote Mercantile and Shitamachi Mercantile. This book does its best to destroy so many of those clichés and stereotypes that the vast majority of foreigners make about the streets of Tokyo. His office, Jorge Almazan Architects, is committed to environmentally responsible and socially inclusive projects spanning from interiors and architecture to urban and community design.

His office, Jorge Almazán Architects, is committed to environmentally responsible and socially inclusive projects spanning from interiors and architecture to urban and community design. It's given me an inspiring new framework for understanding cities, and I'm inspired to see how I can work to encourage more "emergent urbanism" in my own city of Seattle.I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative. Visitors to Japan, architects, and urban policy practitioners alike will come away with a fresh understanding of the world’s premier megacity—and a practical guide for how to bring Tokyo-style intimacy, adaptability, and spontaneity to other cities around the world. Not claiming to be comprehensive, the focus is five structural community types: (1) tight alleyways, (2) zakkyo (tall, narrow, multi-purpose buildings with plentiful signage, (3) under-rail track phenomena, (4) ankyo (covered river streets), and (5) dense, low-rise neighborhoods. Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets.

I recently read a very interesting book on urban planning (or lack of planning) in Tokyo, entitled Emergent Tokyo. I highly recommend the book to people interested in urban design—the graphics are especially well done. My only quibble is that the anecdotes and description of current day make it sound like Tokyo is more moving away from spontaneous design rather than continuing the path of spontaneous design, contrary to the book title. It's been hard for me to articulate why new development feels "soulless" and what it takes to give a city "soul", but I've always felt that Tokyo certainly had it.We also see the vast differences between corporate-led Tokyo and Emergent Tokyo and how they each play out and their influence on the people and places around them. Overall, it was fascinating learning about Tokyo's urban development context - how Japan's system of strong property rights has made it challenging for real estate developers to do large scale redevelopment; it was only with the 2002 Law on Special Measures for Urban Renaissance, which designated specific areas of the city as special zones where existing urban regulations were suspended, that developers could negotiate case-by-case deals with local government officials to redevelop these parts of the city.