The Urban Metabolism of Sharing Tokyo

Essay, expanding design practices, No Density, Peter Carl, Sharing Tokyo, Territory and mobility.

Architect, Cities, City challenge, Community, Essay, Healthy city, Heritage, Innovation, Research, System Metabolism, Tokyo, Topography, Transportation, Urban infrastructure.

The concept of “sharing” in the title Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Kayoko Ota, is incorporated in its structure, with no less than 22 contributors to its argument. Most of these are architects presently practicing in Tokyo, several of whom have been the subject of Ota’s lectures from the past decade or so; but there is also a 100-page photo documentation of contemporary Tokyo by Kenta Hasegawa as well as essays and interviews from several disciplines and helpful analytic studies from the Japan Research Initiative run by Mostafavi at the GSD, Harvard. At a time when architecture, and the practice of urban transformation generally, is undertaking a revaluation of its paradigms and themes, Tokyo offers an important vehicle for research; and this ambitious book will be a significant resource for thinking creatively about that revaluation. Here, we will follow a trajectory through progressively more intimate scales of endeavor.