Japanese planning (or lack of it)

[Khaul]

Our Japanese layouts would benefit from understanding they way Japanese cities work.

First of all, proof of parking and no street parking rules (they apply to the whole country, not only to urban areas) https://www.reinventingparking.org/2014/06/japans-proof-of-parking-rule-has.html

 

Japanese urban form ("transit oriented development" before the term was coined) http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/european-american-and-japanese.html

 

Japanese zoning rules http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html as opposed to (Euclidean) North American zoning http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/euclidian-zoning.html

 

Now, if you got really excited http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000234477.pdf 

[bill937ca]

How about factory combined housing?  A Japanese language article:

 

http://okolab.net/project/research-project/修士論文2017-research-project/7105/

[railsquid]

54 minutes ago, Khaul said:

Our Japanese layouts would benefit from understanding they way Japanese cities work.

First of all, proof of parking and no street parking rules (they apply to the whole country, not only to urban areas) https://www.reinventingparking.org/2014/06/japans-proof-of-parking-rule-has.html

 

 

Yup, like I said on another thread recently, on-street parking and parking bays on public roads basically do not exist in Japan, outside of a very limited number of parking meter spaces, and probably some other rare exceptions [*]. Basically if you see a business with parking spaces outside, even immediately adjacent to the road, they'll be on the business' property

 

[*] like the road I live on, which is a new 6m wide road with farmland on one side and little through-traffic, I see one vehicle parked overnight sometimes.

[bill937ca]

Awhile ago I made a list of features unique to Japan.

 

buildings covered with signs and bilboards

vending machines everywhere

rear door tram boarding (most systems are pay exit, Tokyo Toden is an exception-there may be more)

odd parking spots (on private property)

sidewalk less back streets

tram station stop line

advertising towers

small railway crossings

crossings in stations

road fences (on major streets)

 

[kvp]

Reading the articles on various city structures reminded me that while some parts of the statements are true, many east european cities could not be classified into any of those groups. For example the city i live in, Budapest, has a more organic and not really planned but still long time regulated structure.

 

The first city (then called Aquincum) was already around in roman times and quite a few of those old structures survived to the modern day along with the original road structure. (this is how my university ended up with a still functioning roman amphiteather and the city had tap water since it was founded and it was kept operational through middle ages) There is a restaurant that is called the hundred years old restaurant, but it already had this name two centuries ago. Some of the thermal baths are literally thousands of years old, while others just barely a few hundred years. This would be ok for Rome, but the old border of the roman empire literally went straight through the city, so it was out in the sticks back then.

 

The other and mostly visible characteristic of the city is its organic growth. Like on a tree, you can see the rings of the old city limits, with the original city walls forming the inner downtown, surrounded by the little boulvards (ring roads), the modern 18th century city limits surrounded by the grand boulvards, the 19th century city limits and the outer boulvards and the ring railway, the 20th century limits with the ring highway system. Connecting these are avenues, following the path of old highways and forming junctions at the intersections of these two types of roads. Mass transit hubs are located at these places (spaced more or less evenly). This is very similar how Tokyo was planned, but this was mostly not planned, it just happened like this. Funny how in the center of the downtown there are narrow pedestrian streets with the name of a distant city, later wider roads, then from the 3rd ring internatinal highways. On the Pest side of the river in the middle there is a square with the base walls of a lone roman watchtower under the pavement. Opposite on the Buda side, there is the Castle hill.

 

For zoning, most of the inner city follows the more than 2000 years old zoning system of mixed use rules. Buildings up to 6 stories high (maximal safe height with classic brick construction),  shops, retail and restaurants on the basement/ground floor, offices on ground and first, residential on first floor and up. Even newly built house complexes follow this system. Highrises up to 12 floors could only be built outside the innermost two rings, skyscrapers outside the 3rd. These tend to cluster around the main road intersections. Communist planning on the outskirts kept the system, but switched from houses circling an inner yard to houses in a park system, while keeping the mixed use rules. More recent developments use both.

 

The result is that if you walk along a street (mostly any street that is not suburban), you see storefronts. Retail, restaurants or small companies. The number of small scale manufacturing in inner city districts has dropped in recent years, but still you could find plenty of them, mosty using cheaper basement spaces with retail above to separate them from residential levels. Heavy industry has fully left though and it moves out to the green belt roughly every 100 years just to get caught within the city again.

 

Suburban areas have two types, newly built american style true suburban or a small neighbouring village that found itself in the city with its old town center still intact and ex farmland around the edges with newer suburban homes and older farmhouses next to each other. Transit hubs are usually in the old town centers and the old highways slowly become city avenues as the city grows.

 

The transit system is old. Subways and suburban lines are radial while tram lines and sbahn are mostly circular. The first electric subway is from the 19th century and most routes were already horse tramways before that. Buses and trolleybuses fill out the net and mostly connect to transit junctions at radial/circular street crossings.

 

Why i described this is that i think Tokyo used to look a lot like what i wrote above. Then the great Kanto earthquake happened, then WW2, then the common 25 to 35 year rebuilding cycle. This erased most classic organic urban structures and most buildings that were otherwise present at the dawn of the 20th century and only a few place names remained. It would be very hard to find many buildings standing both on the 1964 olympic aerial photos and today's modern skyline of Tokyo.

 

ps: sorry for the high wall of text, but i think the organically built city model is missing from most descriptions

Edited March 15, 2018 by kvp

[Khaul]

kvp,

 

Thanks for the high wall of text. I agree with you about the author somehow lacking an understanding of how European cities grew. His writing follows his observation of how many European city centres look nowadays. However, what he calls city centre is often a XIX century expansion that happened as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Correct me if I am wrong but it looks to me most of Pest follows this pattern. That would be also the case of Haussman's Paris and Cerda's Barcelona, where I come from originally.

 

I am not sure about calling continental European planning practices organic. The old city plus the city centres built as extensions in the XIX century consolidated in the first half of the XXth, but they only grew spectacularly in the war free second half of the century. The challenge at the time was to accommodate cars into European cities. Planned extensions in the 1960s, often towers in the park, were done to accommodate cars. Shops are still provided at walking distance but usually in buildings separated from the residential blocks, i.e. this area of Kispest https://www.google.com.au/maps/@47.4550556,19.1517235,3a,60y,101.39h,83.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sclvOhMWiTcUM-JNkfkrC6A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

 

It is true that Tokyo was flattened first by the Great Kanto earthquake and then by incendiary bombs at the end of WW2. However, Kyoto which did not suffer any of those mass destruction events looks quite similar to Tokyo in its urban form. The point of the article is that the flexible, laissez-faire Japanese planning policy combined with a conscious non-laissez faire effort to not to succumb to the charms of the motor car is what makes the "success" of the Japanese city form.

 

A side note: one can see some sort of organic growth in Central and Eastern Europe. I am more familiar with the case of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. There the communist government tried to accommodate the booming population in government built flats but they were never able to keep up with demand so they let people build their own house. This self construction indeed happened first along the roads radiating from the centre (to Vienna, Klagenfurt and Trieste). Blocks of public housing were built here and there. The government of Slovenia was also very pro car so they improve the arterial roads, built a Ringautobahn and got rid of trams. Now Ljubljana has a pretty, very small, pretty old city centre surrounded by very a few XIX century streets and a huge, messy, boring and largely car dependent sprawl around it. If you want to buy a screw driver you need to drive (or be ready for a long bus ride) to a big box shop in the outskirts. If you want model trains better go to Austria.

 

Well, yet again a wall of text...

[bill937ca]

Lets have a look at the streets of Tokyo.  First video is on a narrow two lane street with sidewalks. The author works his way out to a major four lane street also with sidewalks and then doubles back to another four lane arterial street with sidewalks. Then he heads along back streets without sidewalks past a rare surface parking lot. With the newer large buildings these streets seem to function as alley ways although legally I believe these are streets.

 

 

Author's notes:

 

Shinjuku Ni-chōme Shinjuku Ni-chōme (新宿二丁目), referred to colloquially as Ni-chōme or simply Nichō, is Area 2 in the Shinjuku District of the Shinjuku Special Ward of Tōkyō, Japan. With Tōkyō home to 13 million people, and Shinjuku known as the noisiest and most crowded of its 23 special wards,[1] Ni-chōme further distinguishes itself as Tōkyō's hub of gay subculture, housing the world's highest concentration of gay bars.

 

Within close walking distance from three train stations (Shinjuku San-chōme Station, Shinjuku Gyoenmae Station, and Japan's busiest train station, Shinjuku Station), the Shinjuku Ni-chōme neighborhood provides a specialized blend of bars, restaurants, cafes, saunas, love hotels, gay pride boutiques, cruising boxes (hattenba), host clubs, nightclubs, massage parlors, parks, and gay book and video stores. In fact within the five blocks centering on street Naka-Dōri between the BYGS building at the Shinjuku San-chōme Station and the small Shinjuku park three blocks to the east, an estimated 300 gay bars and nightclubs provide entertainment.

Edited March 24, 2018 by bill937ca

[kvp]

On 2018. 03. 15. at 4:25 AM, Khaul said:

The challenge at the time was to accommodate cars into European cities. Planned extensions in the 1960s, often towers in the park, were done to accommodate cars. Shops are still provided at walking distance but usually in buildings separated from the residential blocks, i.e. this area of Kispest

 

The luck of Budapest was that Hungary had a chronic lack of cars due to economic reasons, so classic highrise development with little integrated retail was only really started in the 1980ies, then within a few years communism ended, along with these mega projects. The mentioned area is just 8 corners in one corner deep along a major road (also running a tram line as the planned heavy metro line was never finished). The rest around it is classic 19th century suburban sprawl.

 

Budapest is a city that got so large in the 18th and 19th centuries with neighbouring small cities touching each other in the early days of the 19th century and finally merging. BudaPest was formed from the old Roman settlement at Old Buda, the middle ages Buda castle area around castle hill and the mainly 17th to 18th century Pest on the other side (see SeaTac or Greater Vancouver for more modern examples) the 20th century only filled in the blanks between them usually with streetcar neighbourhoods and the real 20th century development began around 1978 at early 1960ies western level and abruptly ended in 1989. Then an american like suburban development began parallel with industrial areas being replaced with high density highrise housing and business buildings, Vancouver style but due to regulations only outside the protected 19th century area. This eliminated most of the post industrial rustbelt around the 18th and 19th century city centers. Also more than 75% of the houses were built pre ww2 and over a century old, including most of the pre 1990 suburban landscape that were originally small towns around one of the cities that merged in the 19th century. Cars just simply arrived way too late and not much was done to accomodate them. The only sufficiently wide roads are the old highways and the newer ring roads and on street parking is used even on streets that were barely enough for two horse carts to pass. (now they are single direction and barely enough for one car and a row of parallel parking ones) This leaves space for around 1 car for every 3 flats including most of the parking needed for car using commuters. The tower block model had only 10 years and most of them were built quite densly with electric public transport (metros, trams, trolleybuses) as the main means of transport. Around 75% of the population uses public transport counting in the nearly 100% car using american style post 1990 suburban areas.

 

ps: The oldest street running electric tram line is part of the current 4-6 tram routes and use the longest trams in the world with 6 cars, arriving every 60 seconds in peak intervals and they are still jam packed. And no, can't really build another subway there as the grand boulvards were built over the old shipping canal ring and the water table is still just 3-4 meters below the ground and the 19th century metro line 1 crossing it at Octogon square was built on top of that with the city's main water pipe running right below the tram line and the main sewer at the 4m depth right below the water main and just below the old subway. Remaining clearance is literally 0 mm in both directions with at one place the sewer roof being the subway tunnel's bottom plate. Now try to tunnel there. Elevated railways were only tried a few times and tram line 2 still runs on top of the old 19th century elevated structure south of the chain bridge, but now it's at street level.

 

(castle hill is another swiss cheese with 5 levels of mostly man made tunnels and basements down to the water level of the Danube river below and there are some thermal water filled caves below that. They did tunnel through the area with line 4 and one station (St. Gellert square at the St. Gellert baths) has a nice unplanned thermal spring leaking through the wall. The city was actually called Aquincum by the romans, guess why... :-)

[kvp]

3 hours ago, bill937ca said:

Lets have a look at the streets of Tokyo.  First video is on a narrow two lane street with sidewalks. The author works his way out to a major four lane street also with sidewalks and then doubles back to another four lane arterial street with sidewalks. Then he heads along back streets without sidewalks past a rare surface parking lot. With the newer large buildings these streets seem to function as alley ways although legally I believe these are streets.

What is the history of the area? Were the large streets always there or were just added by removing blocks between old narrow streets? If the latter, when? (19th or 20th centuries) I'm asking as i still found similar row demolishing road building projects around Tokyo still in progress on google maps. Imho this has to do with Tokyo being a newly built city. The wikipedia has this line:

Between 1600 and 1945, Edo/Tokyo was leveled every 25–50 years or so by fire, earthquakes, or war.

[Khaul]

1 hour ago, kvp said:

The luck of Budapest was that Hungary had a chronic lack of cars due to economic reasons, so classic highrise development with little integrated retail was only really started in the 1980ies, then within a few years communism ended, along with these mega projects. The mentioned area is just 8 corners in one corner deep along a major road (also running a tram line as the planned heavy metro line was never finished). The rest around it is classic 19th century suburban sprawl.

 

Yes, my friend form Péteri told me they had to wait years for a car in Hungary. They cut the waiting time by going for a Dacia which was a true lemon. Things were indeed different in Yugoslavia because of their access to the Western market and local manufacturing by Renault, Citroen and Fiat licensed Yugos. There the communist were for car ownership and built motorways. Belgrade is pretty much the only European capital without a metro.

[bill937ca]

Tight squeeze.

 

https://www.carsensor.net/contents/editor/category_1471/_52298.html

[bill937ca]

Japanese carport diagrams. 

 

https://kabegamiyasan.com/reform/exterior01.html

[ben_issacs]

Folks, 

Not all that clued up on historic buildings in Tokyo, but one that might be considered is Harajuku station on the Yamanote Loop Line.

I believe that this is the only station on that line that escaped destruction during the great fire bomb raids of 1945.

I don't know if the B-29's had specific targets during those raids, I think that it was more area bombing, but they missed this station.

It's a typical medium sized inner city station, but is now getting too small and crowded for the people using it, so it apparently faces demolition.

Regards, 

Bill, 

Melbourne.