When I was a kid, I put quite a few hours into playing certain video games.
I don't remember the details of this stuff, but I do recall that I really enjoyed the
"feel" and "aesthetic" that these games managed to conjure.
It was years later that I realized all of these games were produced by Japanese companies.
Heck, I didn't even realize that my GameCube was a Japanese product until I was like 12,
let alone my family's Toyota.
By the time I was in high school and eating sushi with the cool kids, I was starting to
appreciate the remarkable influence that Japan has on Western culture.
It's totally normal for an average young person in the US to consume Japanese media, eat Japanese-inspired
food, or to wear Japanese-designed clothing.
My point is, Japan has totally punched above its weight regarding influence on The West.
But as I've become interested in Urbanism, I've found myself comparatively underwhelmed
by Japan's lack of influence on our urban design.
Japan, and the Tokyo area in particular, can teach us some lessons in how to make large
cities more people friendly.
They could also teach us something about making good flags.
Gosh are those ever some handsome flags.
The brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have said: "Never underestimate the joy
people derive from hearing something they already know.
So with that in mind: Tokyo.
Is Huge.
With a whopping 37.5 million people, Tokyo is by far the most populous Metro area in
the world, being almost 30% more populous than the runner up, the Delhi Metro Area in
India.
It's sheer size makes it a great case-study in urban layout, but I hope you will soon
agree that many of Tokyo's urban assets don't actually require tens of millions of people
to be sensible.
If you hover over the city on Google Maps, the first thing you'll notice is the street
organization.
Or should I say... disorganization?
This, my friends, this complete mess of a distorted, squished grid, this mega maze of
asphalt and concrete, is a work of urban art.
The streets are small and densely compacted, which allows for a fine network of connectivity
between many nearby places.
Let me reiterate that: the streets are actually connected to one another frequently.
This might seem like a banal factoid to you, but it's an important contributor to giving
people the shortest possible route to their destination, and provides ample choice and
opportunity while wandering around.
In suburban style development, streets are often intentionally not connected to one another
to prevent through traffic.
This makes life slightly less convenient in a car, but way less convenient on foot.
Furthermore, through traffic isn't so bad if it's mostly people walking or biking as
opposed to cars, but ok I'll let that one rest for now.
The fact that the streets are usually at sharp angles, combined with how there are often
buildings or walls directly abbutting the edge of the street at intersections, creates
a field of view which naturally slows down cars.
This is the opposite of wide, gentle corners of highways which have lots of visibility.
These kinds of corners help drivers be confident that there's nothing in their way, and when
driver's are confident, they speed up.
This model was adopted for use in many Western-style suburbs, so much so that some of them more
closely resemble Formula1 tracks than the streets of long ago.
In preventing total car-dominance with sharp angles and limited fields of view, walking
and biking become far more comfortable.
Going slower becomes more interesting - there's always something new to be discovered around
the corner.
It also provides shade and a sort of sheltered feeling at street level.
The densely arrayed midsized buildings form a buffer from the wind, but more importantly
a buffer from the cars themselves.
Despite the fact that this street is a main thoroughfare, I feel like I could safely walk
in the middle of it, like this person!
On the topic of comfort, you may have noticed by now that despite Tokyo's intimidating profile
from the air, it is actually remarkably intimate and quaint in most residential areas.
The width of the streets, the heights of most buildings, and the widths of storefronts are
very human-scale.
If I had one criticism, it would be that the streetscape usually is a bit lacking in greenery,
but small gardens like this go a long way in solving that problem.
Something else that strikes me is the abundance of these things - these symbols indicate schools
and nurseries.
Not every one of them is a full-scale school, and some of them appear rather small on street-view,
but it seems like the a lot of children within Tokyo are essentially walking distance to
their own schools, which is great considering kids can't exactly drive.
If I go to the Orlando at the same magnification, I can see 5 schools, and most of them have
an absurd footprint.
Also notice how they all hug major roadways.
Seriously, this looks more like an industrial warehouse than a middle school.
I cannot imagine an environment which is more debilitating for a kid who can't drive.
You can also see these mini-marts dotted throughout the city, and while I know a lot of you have
heard the speech already, the point that I'm illustrating is this: the more basic and fundamental
the service, the more accessible it should be independent of where you happen to live
in a city.
Everyone needs food, everyone needs medical care, and most everyone needs education.
There should be some allowance for these types of services to be smaller scale and more numerous,
cause that helps everyone access them.
Tokyo just packs a whole bunch of little things into such a walkable area.
Moving on, let's talk about rail.
This says it all.
Even someone who is almost entirely oblivious to transportation infrastructure could look
at this and get the idea that Tokyo's rail network is effective and prioritized.
Much like it's roads, the rail lines form a meshwork of sorts, which gives passengers
lots of options for how they can get from one place to another.
There are many connective nodes which means that, when you find yourself near a given
node, you can efficiently get to another one regardless of its direction, within reason.
This nodal connectivity is one of the many keys to enable people to fully replace their
car ownership with public transit usage.
Comparing this to Chicago's radial spoke-style rail, and we can easily see how disadvantageous
it is to lack connectivity throughout the whole rail network.
Chicago's rail is clearly directed at bringing people out from the more suburban areas into
the business district for work, and then back home at 5.
But if someone over here needs to get over here just to visit a friend, the rail system
is inefficient as heck.
Now I know there will always be some trips for which rail is impractical, but in the
case of chicago, basically anything along this curved axis is difficult.
I'd like to stress, once again, that this concept has nothing to do with Tokyo's massive
population.
A "unit" of meshwork can be very small, and simply scaled up when the need arises, whether
this be for light rail, subways, bus lines, or pedestrian-oriented streets.
Not everything needs to be a perfect grid, but connectivity should be maintained as the
service expands, whatever it is.
It's actually worth revisiting this concept with streets.
This is Salt Lake City, known for its huge block sizes and thus, low nodal connectivity.
A given path along any of these lines has a low "frequency of choice" for which direction
to take.
Compare that to Paris, where the frequency of nodes, and thus frequency of choice, is
so much greater.
This creates a really important psychological factor when at street-level.
Standing in one intersection in Paris, I can see multiple other intersections that are
within walking distance - they're visually approachable.
In Salt Lake City, when standing in the vast expanse of asphalt that is an intersection,
I literally cannot even see the next one.
Its just adjacent to this building, by the way..
If you thought Paris's street map looked nice and connected, this is Tokyo's.
Yeah.
Anyway the same principles apply to rail, which is part of what makes Tokyo's rail map
so functional, on top of Japan's exceptional reputation for punctuality and efficiency
of rail service.
It's a bit intimidating at first, because let's be honest, its complex.
But so are the needs of people and the needs of cities.
Once you get the hang of it, the complexity becomes enabling, not disabling.
Okay lastly, zoning.
Zoning is a bit of a difficult thing for me to discuss because honestly it's way out of
my league.
Nonetheless, the golden nugget of Japanese Zoning is summarized in this document, which
I found on the Urban Kchoze blog.
I also think Greg at Life Where I'm from talked about this document in his videos about the
topic.
The basic principle is really simple.
Within this chart, the various zones are split into columns.
The various services that can be built and operated in each zone are split into rows.
The more yellow a given column is, the more services are allowed to exist in that zone.
The diagonality of this line and the triangularity of yellowness is important.
With each successive zone we retain the ability to build whatever was allowed in the previous
zone, until we get to truly industrial areas.
Just to dork out for a minute, this inclusionary arrangements sort of like an upper triangular
matrix, whereas more exclusionary zoning could be represented in the same fashion by a regular
old diagonal matrix.
If you look closely, even the most restrictive zone still allows schools, shrines, and clinics
to co-exist with low-rise residential buildings.
You can also operate small-scale shops out of your home in these areas!
These services aren't obnoxious, they're pretty low-key.
Without being too disruptive, even the most restrictive zoning allows for a lot of walkability,
especially for school age children and the elderly.
Just one step up and you can have what I imagine are essentially convenience stores, and some
restaurants.
If you just make sure that these zones aren't too far from these zones, you can imagine
that very few people would need a car to get accomplish most daily tasks.
If you want to add more services to a given area, then you also have to allow people to
live in denser housing Something that is important to stress with
this arrangement, is that these laws don't say there has to be a school in the most restrictive
zone, any more than the commercial zone must have bathhouses with private rooms.
If there is no demand for a school because of the demographics of that neighbourhood,
that's fine.
But IF there is demand for a school, it can be built!
This way you can have a fairly substantial elementary school right in the middle of a
residential neighbourhood without even needing a parking lot.
If you think of schools as loud, bustling, and busy, that might be due to the car traffic
that is necessitated by the design of the neighbourhood, and not, you know, because
of the kids.
Greg at Life Where I'm From probably went into better detail about this zoning stuff,
and I'll leave the real-life Tokyo experience to him.
You should totally check out his videos.
What I can say, is that Tokyo's density, high nodal connectivity, and inclusionary zoning
all allow for it to be navigated on foot, by bike, or by public transit.
Compare these modal share numbers to say, Auckland, New Zealand, and you can see just
how much Tokyo prioritizes urban livability.
I don't really know how to end this video, so I guess I'll just apologize for not posting
in a while.
Life gets busy sometimes, but I do hope to make more videos in the future.
If you want to help make that happen, please consider supporting me on patreon.
No one has joined it yet, so you could be the first!
I'll think about posting videos there early.... or something.... what the heck do people even
do with their Patreons?
Maybe you can give me some ideas.
Well that's all for now!
Like and Subscribe, and I'll see ya next time!