I am putting up a few posts on Tokyo in the coming days. They are about my recent work on residential redevelopments outside of the yamanote ring that I have carried out with Jessica Illunga and Jorge Almazan of Keio University.
It’s a tad ironic that I have become so engaged in this contemporary urban development issue. My first home in Tokyo was ARK Hills in Roppongi 1-chome, where we lived for half a year between 2012-13. ARK Hills opened its gates in the 1980s and is arguably the ground zero of neoliberal Tokyo.
Until ten or so years ago, these massive mixed-use developments still had a relatively unique aura. They were concentrated in the center and lured their well-heeled inhabitants with distinct architecture, upscale dining and retail, as well as cultural venues. This is the Mori Tokyo.
I put up quite a few Instagram posts back in 2012 (which, the Luddite I am, was the only time I really used the platform) and paste some below, with a few other reflections, for nostalgic reference.
Like it or loathe it, it is hard to imagine these areas without these major developments now that Mori has basically transformed large parts of downtown Tokyo from Shinbashi to Roppongi. An example discussed on this blog was Toranomon Hills going up nearby from where we lived. That was in 2013.
There were obviously frictions all the way from the beginning. Roppongi Crossings by Roman Cybriwsky is a good English language chronicle of some of the conflicts. Roppongi Hills, with its late-bubble exuberance cast in stone (although it only opened around the turn of the millennium), heavily altered the geography of the area.
Today, however, it has developed some of its own context, and communicates with its vicinity. It has gentrified yet also revitalized (or sanitized, depending on your viewpoint) the wider area, and together with some of the other nearby developments has created interesting corridors of engagement. My university was right within the middle of the art triangle of the Mori Art Museum, the National Art Center and the 21_21 Design Sight.
What is the capacity of a city to accommodate these mega developments?
Since I took the photos above more than ten years ago, their proliferation has become more rampant, and the thought process behind them certainly not as developed as in Mori’s strange neo-Corbusian theory. Most of these cater to a mass upper middle class market, and spawn residential towers with little provision for other uses bar some ground level basic amenities.
In short, they look cheaper, more generic. Given their higher numbers, they appear more threatening to the city’s urban fabric, especially as they increasingly stretch out beyond the yamanote ring. The motivation to work with Jessica and Jorge was to better describe the problem, i.e., develop some kind of taxonomy for these redevelopments. And there was some strong personal interest.
Because not only did we stay in ARK Hills for six months in 2012-13, we also lived in Ebara 4-chome from 2017-19. On our daily walks to Musashikoyama station, we saw the Park City monster grow floor by floor, with the memory of the yokocho that predated it growing fainter and fainter. I am glad it made it into our paper as one of the three case studies.
