Tokyo’s urban manufacturing economy is legendary. Today I visited its epicentre in Ota-ku, the capital’s southernmost ward to get a feel for what could be an interesting avenue for my research.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
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.
Where is the SAAB?
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.
House on stilts, Dala (c) Manuel Oka