Mini-home social immobility

I walked past Azuma’s Tower House again yesterday. This amazingly small 50-year-old brick block in Gaien-Mae is perhaps the first in a long tradition of extremely small residential buildings in Tokyo. And while the architecture of scarcity brings about unprecedented creativity, it is also a reminder of what is wrong modern (real estate) capitalism.

tower house

Where is the SAAB?

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More on Yangon slums

As a follow-up to my post on Yangon’s slums, more browsing reveals the existence of an interesting UN Habitat project. It is called Mapping Yangon. The little information that is available about it confirms some of my earlier suspicions about the state of these informal settlements in Burma’s former capital.

stilt house

House on stilts, Dala (c) Manuel Oka

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