I have two recommendations for walking to the International House of Japan (IHJ): A 10 minute scenic tour. A 10 minute mole tour (if you want to minimize your time outdoors). The scenic option offers a complete crash course in walkable urbanism, hidden in the most mundane details. As I have written elsewhere, most of our knowledge about how to build a walkable city has yet … Continue reading Directions to IHJ (International House of Japan)
Jiyugaoka is one of five major town centers in Tokyo’s Meguro ward (目黒区), which is one of the city’s most densely populated wards, with 49,000 people per square mile. The two train stations which intersect here boast combined daily boardings of approximately 150,000 passengers (CBRE data). This commercial nucleus features a tremendous number of storefronts, all within a 6 minute walk of Jiyugaoka Station: … Continue reading Walkable City – Jiyugaoka (自由が丘)
The area southwest of Kitano-cho (the western halves of 中山手通 & 山本通) is notable for hosting many educational institutions: St Michael Nursery, Kobe Kakyo Kindergarten, Kobe Elementary School, Shinko High School, Kobe Chinese School, and Kobe Yamate University. How safe are the streets for students walking to school? As described previously, streets in Japan can be analysed hierarchically, and classified on a five rank scale. The streets in this area occupy only … Continue reading Hierarchy of Japanese Streets – Sorakuen Garden (相楽園)
Pedestrian movement paths in Japanese cities can be decomposed hierarchically, proceeding from the narrowest residential laneways to the busiest shopping streets (near rail stations). – As described previously, the highest levels of the pedestrian hierarchy are completely separate from the vehicular network. – The following illustration shows the structure of these streets near Sannomiya station dark green: subway tunnels light green: shopping arcades blue: nightlife alleys peach: … Continue reading Hierarchy of Japanese Streets – Illustrated
The city of Kobe is currently moving forward with major street improvements which will culminate in the total pedestrianization of downtown’s Sannomiya area (a major commuter rail hub with no less than six stations). This will greatly enhance the overall appeal of central Kobe, and could be a real game changer for international tourism. The following is a rough translation of this press release, which describes … Continue reading Road Diet in Kobe: Fukiai-Minami (葺合南)
Fractal-like networks effectively endow life with an additional fourth spatial dimension. This is the origin of quarter-power scaling that is so pervasive in biology. Organisms have evolved hierarchical branching networks that terminate in size-invariant units, such as capillaries […] Natural selection has tended to maximize both metabolic capacity, by maximizing the scaling of exchange surface areas, and internal efficiency, by minimizing the scaling of transport distances … Continue reading Fractal Order: Organic Cities vs Mechanical Cities
For a very thorough and extremely well illustrated explanation of the advantages of narrow streets, please see these definitive posts by A.A. Price: Human-Scale Streets and Narrow Streets. A.A. Price’s posts demonstrate viscerally the aesthetic value of narrow streets. But how can we quantify this quality? First, we must look at what we mean by street width; does it refer to the width of the road itself, or the … Continue reading Narrow Streets Index
Have you ever heard somebody confuse the words “modern” and “western”? It’s a very unsettling experience. Perhaps because it seems to come not from any maliciousness or intentionality per se, but from a deeply subconscious assumption that anything cutting edge must be western in origin. Deconstructing the Discourse of Westernization Superficially, the steel and glass structure of Mori Tower contrasts with the wooden construction techniques of traditional … Continue reading Roppongi Hills – 洋風 or 和風？
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