“Tokyo’s Urban Planning Pioneers Innovations in Senior and Shared Housing” by Enric Massip-Bosch

What can we learn from a city as dense as Tokyo?

Concrete problem-solving is important, as well as leaving room for unforeseen events to happen.

Tokyo is a dynamic and constantly surprising city that manages to maintain a human scale despite being one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. It is also a clean, safe city with highly reliable public transportation. The character and education of the Japanese people play a significant role, but it can also be seen the other way around: an orderly city helps foster civic behavior. This is an important lesson, and in this regard, Barcelona has gone through better and worse periods—we must be consistent in maintaining a level of coexistence that is acceptable for everyone. Tokyo is not a “beautiful” city in the European sense; rather, it is made up of diverse and sometimes dissonant layers, which can make it seem chaotic. However, it functions like clockwork, and this is another important lesson from Tokyo: abstract and absolute planning is not as essential as concrete solutions and allowing room for unexpected developments. More regulation does not necessarily create a better city; in fact, it often prevents necessary and inevitable changes from being resolved naturally or from allowing us to adapt to them easily.

What characteristics of Tokyo’s urban planning can be applied to Barcelona?

We would benefit from having fewer rules and being much stricter in enforcing them.

In Barcelona, beneath an appearance of order and regularity, there is often a disordered and spontaneous reality that emerges despite the rules—or even against them. We would benefit from having fewer regulations and enforcing them much more strictly. In some aspects, comparisons are difficult: Tokyo has around a hundred universities and a very strong educational and research ecosystem closely linked to industry. However, in architecture, Barcelona is ahead in areas such as sustainability and reuse, although Tokyo is rapidly catching up. On the other hand, Japan is innovating in senior and shared housing. One urban quality of Tokyo that Barcelona lacks is diversity. Our planning relies on a limited number of models and does not allow for parts of the city to develop with different characteristics. This is not due to Barcelona’s compactness—Paris, a similarly compact city, has greater diversity in housing types. The debate on how to make cities denser to accommodate the thousands of homes we need could serve as an opportunity to generate more typological diversity. Tokyo is an example of how a city can be dense and still highly pleasant at the same time.

Read the full article here.

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