Tokyo: Space Management

IKEA are not the masters of space management - Tokyo has been mastering it for 100s of years. I think it's because they don't have space for excuses...

Observations:

If you live on a island that is essentially a mountain range in the ocean, flat land to build cities on is probably always going to be an issue. Rather than constantly have a sook about the cost of land and fail to do anything about it, the citizens of Tokyo have just been engineering their way out of it instead.

An overpass is just another opportunity to build a restaurant/train station/hotel/bus station/shopping mall.

Most of those overpasses are *not* for cars though - highways are too expensive, inefficient at moving people, and take up too much space. In Tokyo (and Japan in general), the train rules under and above ground.

That's not to say there aren't any - the Shuto Expressway is the major elevated highway across the greater Tokyo area, the main difference is that it isn't 90% of Tokyo's transport obsession since most people don't use cars, and there is far less traffic congestion in Tokyo than in say Brisbane, even though Tokyo has far more people in it. e.g. Brisbane doesn't have a problem with street racing on highways like Tokyo does because you can't go very far without running into a traffic jam in Brisbane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_Night_Club

Oh and btw - there are tolls on all these roads...

In any case, most of it was built in the 60s, often over the rivers and canals that were left as the last remaining available space. Some of them are converted into pedestrian parks and green space underneath - or at least, these are some of the cleanest drains I've seen...

Cars might be the ugly duckling compared to trains in Tokyo, but that doesn't mean they don't have a space-saving solution for storing them like a vending machine:

https://www.giken.com/en/video/eco-park-automat…

Which is really similar to how they treat bicycles:

https://www.giken.com/en/products/automated-par…

A lot of people ride bikes in Japan (with no helmets or lycra), but I think all those city bike hire schemes should replace their bike stations with these underground ones - they are such a ridiculously good idea.

The building footprint of a lot of buildings is still the same Edo-era shopfront, which results in some really narrow high rises. I poached these pics from the internets, but they are a pretty much what we saw all over the place - it's all sorts of buildings too, not just the fancy ones in some glossy architecture magazine. Though I'm sure you could make a book out of Tokyo's narrow buildings alone.

Places like Tokyo make you realise there are plenty of well-tested solutions to a lot of problems we are told are significant challenges by our local overlords. The real challenge is not population growth, it's we are such a bunch of lazy sooky la las, we don't do anything about it!

Kaiju Collected:

A lot of solutions for dealing with urban development and population growth.Read more