Emergent Tokyo

This book examines the urban fabric of contemporary Tokyo as a valuable demonstration of permeable, inclusive, and adaptive urban patterns that required neither extensive master planning nor corporate urbanism to develop. These urban patterns are emergent: that is, they are the combined result of numerous modifications and appropriations of space by small agents interacting within a broader socio-economic ecosystem. Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world's cities. This book examines five of these patterns that appear conspicuously throughout Tokyo: yokocho alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, low-rise dense neighborhoods, and the river-like ankyo streets. Unlike many of the discussions on Tokyo that emphasise cultural uniqueness, this book aims at transcultural validity, with a focus on empirical analysis of the spatial and social conditions that allow these patterns to emerge. The authors of Emergent Tokyo acknowledge the distinct character of Tokyo without essentialising or fetishising it, offering visitors, architects, and urban policy practitioners an unparalleled understanding of Tokyo's urban landscape.

This book presents current developments in city planning and architecture in East Asia. It describes the many neighborhoods in which the region’s large cities are modernizing or expanding with innovative structures and advanced construction projects. It combines a typology of public structures with an analysis of the compositional principles of urban environments. Thus, it finally connects new developments in city planning with new developments in architecture, and considers examples such as CCTV, Lujiazui, Kansai Airport, Xinyi, Taipei 101, Chek Lap Kok, Cheonggyecheon, Roppongi Hills, Da Shanzi, Shahe, Omotesando, and Marina Bay from a new perspective.And the new perspectives presented here are not just theoretical: some forty full-page bird’s eye views prepared especially for this volume show these future urban settings in highly detailed images of breathtaking beauty. The result is a rich portrait of the coming together of global and local influences in non-Western countries. With its systematic approach, this presentation by one of the leading international experts in the field is a reference work on a topic of central importance to the world of construction today.

This book is about the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, living in and around Tokyo; it is, therefore, about what has been pushed to the margins of history. Customarily, anthropologists and public officials have represented Ainu issues and political affairs as limited to rural pockets of Hokkaido. Today, however, a significant proportion of the Ainu people live in and around major cities on the main island of Honshu, particularly Tokyo. Based on extensive original ethnographic research, this book explores this largely unknown diasporic aspect of Ainu life and society. Drawing from debates on place-based rights and urban indigeneity in the twenty-first century, the book engages with the experiences and collective struggles of Tokyo Ainu in seeking to promote a better understanding of their cultural and political identity and sense of community in the city. Looking in-depth for the first time at the urban context of ritual performance, cultural transmission and the construction of places or ‘hubs’ of Ainu social activity, this book argues that recent government initiatives aimed at fostering a national Ainu policy will ultimately founder unless its architects are able to fully recognize the historical and social complexities of the urban Ainu experience.

"This is a freaking great book and I highly recommend it…if you are passionate about the history of 'the world's greatest city,' this book is something you must have in your collection." --JapanThis.com Edward Seidensticker's A History of Tokyo 1867-1989 tells the fascinating story of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to the largest and the most modern city in the world. With the same scholarship and sparkling style that won him admiration as the foremost translator of great works of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his brilliant vision of an entire society suddenly wrenched from an ancient feudal past into the modern world in a few short decades, and the enormous stresses and strains that this brought with it. Originally published as two volumes, Seidensticker's masterful work is now available in a handy, single paperback volume. Whether you're a history buff or Tokyo-bound traveler looking to learn more, this insightful book offers a fascinating look at how the Tokyo that we know came to be. This edition contains an introduction by Donald Richie, the acknowledged expert on Japanese culture who was a close personal friend of the author, and a preface by geographer Paul Waley that puts the book into perspective for modern readers.

This open access book connects Jane Jacobs's celebrated urban analysis to her ideas on economics and social theory. While Jacobs is a legend in the field of urbanism and famous for challenging and profoundly influencing urban planning and design, her theoretical contributions – although central to her criticisms of and proposals for public policy – are frequently overlooked even by her most enthusiastic admirers. This book argues that Jacobs’s insight that “a city cannot be a work of art” underlies both her ideas on planning and her understanding of economic development and social cooperation. It shows how the theory of the market process and Jacobs’s theory of urban processes are useful complements – an example of what economists and urbanists can learn from each other. This Jacobs-cum-market-process perspective offers new theoretical, historical, and policy analyses of cities, more realistic and coherent than standard accounts by either economists or urbanists.

World Financial Orders challenges the predominance of neo-liberalism as a mode of knowledge about contemporary world finance, and claims that it neglects the social and political bases as well as the malign consequences of change. He looks to the field of International Political Economy (IPE) to construct an alternative mode, one that critically restores society and politics. An 'historical' approach to IPE is advanced that accounts for modern world finance since the seventeenth century as a succession of structurally distinct hierarchical social orders. This book will be of interest to those working in the field of IPE and to those scholars, researchers and students from across the social sciences who seek to challenge the common-sense, neo-liberal explanation of contemporary world finance.