Really great analysis, with a lot of ideas and suggestions that anybody can advocate for in their own cities. It talks about how light city planning and decentralized market forces produce the delightful lived environment of Tokyo. Seeing Tokyo's implementation of various pattterns gives an idea of alternatives to standard ideas and acts as a foil to better understand what's desirable about the dense patterns of, say, Copenhagen.

Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. Tokyo is one of my favorite cities, and is also the world largest metropolis (with a metro population of 38 million. Joe McReynolds is an urban studies scholar affiliated with Keio University, where he studies Tokyo’s approach to urban development and how public policy shapes its urban fabric and communities, particularly Tokyo’s myriad subcultures. Linda Hall charts the development of the fixtures and fittings we still see today - from medieval and Tudor times to Georgian and Victorian. Emergent Tokyo answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo's most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets.

The latter required developers with "the patience and capital to acquire and merge multiple plots over the years or even decades". This book examines five of these patterns that appear conspicuously throughout Tokyo: yokocho alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, low-rise dense neighbourhoods, and the river-like ankyo streets.

Emergent Tokyo features three undertrack infill sites: Ameyoko Shotengai under the elevated JR lines between Ueno and Okachimachi Stations, the undertrack infills at Koenji Station on the Chuo Line and the Ginza Corridor, a 12m deep and 420m long undertrack area in the Ginza district.On undertrack infills, these sprang up under the elevated sections of railway tracks, raised up to avoid competing with vehicular traffic at crossings under the national policy of "grade separation". Not claiming to be comprehensive, the focus is five structural community types: (1) tight alleyways, (2) zakkyo (tall, narrow, multi-purpose buildings with plentiful signage, (3) under-rail track phenomena, (4) ankyo (covered river streets), and (5) dense, low-rise neighborhoods. Compared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings. His professional practice in Japan includes award-winning community spaces as provocative public space interventions.