The View from Inside the Dumpling - why Tokyo looks the way it does IYI

One of the first things one realizes upon arriving in Tokyo is that the layout doesn't make any sense. There is no real center of the city, and block by block things seem to alternate from looking like this.

 To this

In no apparent order.

A couple of weeks ago I went to an exhibit at the Opera City Art Museum that tackled the question of why Tokyo looks the way it does. The exhibit was called Tokyo Metabolizing.

The exhibit opens with two arial cityscape shots. One of Paris, labeled the monarchist city, showed wide avenues converging to major buildings, parks, and squares. The other was New York, the capitalist city, with it's clear efficient grid and large tall buildings. The juxtaposition begs the question, so what kind of city is Tokyo?

The answer, the dumpling city.

But lets back up.

Metabolism was an architectural movement back in the 50s and 60s based on the idea that buildings should be constructed modularly so that their components could be replaced when newer and better versions came along. Now despite a few notable buildings this notion didn't catch on.

But while metabolism as an architectural movement wasn't the wave of the future it aspired to be, Tokyo in many ways resembles the metabolism ideal. What's distinct about Tokyo as aposed to other major cities is the speed at which it is constantly regenerating and how much the landscape is dominated by small structures. In a city of 36 million people there are 1.8 million property owners. Statistically speaking, unlike what most tourists see when they come to Tokyo, the second scene above is much more representative of what Tokyo looks like.

The average lifetime of a housing unit in Tokyo is 25 years, which means on average the city has completely rebuilt it's entire housing stock twice since the end of World War II. By comparison in New York the figure it's more like 100 years, and in many European cities it's older then that.

Tokyo's history as a fairly calamity prone city has shaped it's development. Earthquakes, fires, and American bombers in world war II have resulted in periodic destruction and necessitated regeneration.  It's not entirely surprising in a city where the ground moves for people to have a slightly different view about the permanence of buildings that developed in the west.

In order to guard the city against future disasters, when the city was rebuilt in the fifties the mass web of small structures was carved up by large multi-lane roads. For example, like the one pictured above. Along those main thoroughfares would be high rise and fire proof buildings. The result is really effective fire walls that separate these individual little urban villages. The metaphor here is the dumpling. The fire resistant tall buildings are the shell. The maze of small dense structures are the filling.

Inside that dumpling you run across some pretty wild buildings.

 Tiny old shrines

And some things that make you glad that the average lifespan of a housing unit is only 25 years...

Each dumpling is in many ways it's own mini city or village. Each one features, restaurants, stores, pretty much everything you need on a daily basis located around a central train station. This gives the whole city a kind of fractal geometry and symmetry where patterns are repeated at ever larger scales. Where major subway lines intersect you have massive train stations that are the basis of the major shopping centers, and skyscraper districts. 

Tokyo is really a quite unique city. 

Below is the only really decent youtube video I could find of the exhibit, taken from it's showing in venice.