Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City #

Author Jorge Almazán
Date Febuary 3, 2025
Rating 5/5

This feels like one of those lightning in a bottle moments, where aimlessly watching videos online or surfing the web actually leads you to a book or organization that intrests you greatly. I came across this book thanks to Dami Lee and her videos on architecture, notably one on the development of Tokyo.

I am no urban designer or architect, I merely find these subjects to be quite interesting, probably in part due to greater online discourse in these subjects (notably urban planning) in recent years. Unfortunately, a great deal of this online discourse is very euro-centric, tending to miss valuable insight that other cities from around the world. Tokyo, however, does tend to get discussed a great deal even with the euro-centrism present in these communities, however this leads to a very orientalist view of Tokyo (and Japanese cities more broadly), other-ifying a city and community that we can learn a lot from. Jorge Almazán’s book Emergent Tokyo is one of the few pieces of reading I have engaged with that has laid this fact bare, and then analyzed Tokyo with this understanding.

The lens by which the principles of Tokyo’s ground-up development are discussed (through emergence), is incredibly interesting, and something I feel a lot of modern urbanists neglect. I think a lot of people know that corporate-led urbanism tends to feel unsavour, or tends to feel rather exclusionary, but, at least for me, it tends to be difficult to fully understand why I feel that way. Almazán’s analysis on how these environment are shaped, and on how they differ to more agglomerative, community-based environments, makes the distinction bare. Now it seems I won’t be able to not see any of the things he discusses or warns about in this book in the cities that I have lived in.

This is a really great read.