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One city that we didn't talk about from Monocle's recent Quality of Life Survey, but that regularly appears on the list, is Tokyo. In this year's ranking, it was bestowed with "best for cleanliness."
All of this isn’t to say that there’s no rubbish in Tokyo but, overall, it’s much tidier than other cities of a comparable size. Tokyo spends a fortune on keeping things presentable. The Clean Authority of Tokyo’s waste management budget for the central wards is ¥105bn (€640m) this year, of which ¥83bn (€507m) is dedicated to cleaning. But the secret to the city’s sparkle is that it’s not simply the work of city employees: it’s a collective job.
If any of you can remember my "Takeaways from Japan" post from this earlier this year, you might recall that cleanliness shows up in my first point. It is absolutely astounding that the largest city in the world — it almost has the entire population of Canada — manages to be so clean. On top of this, it manages to achieve this with almost no public garbage bins.
If you've been to Tokyo, you'll know this. There are very few places to throw out your garbage in a public space. This is perhaps the irony of Tokyo's cleanliness. But it works because of the expectation that people will take their garbage home and then sort it according to the city's strict separation rules. And of course, this is what people do.
That said, there are some other reasons for the lack of public bins, namely the 1995 subway sarin attack. There remains a deep fear that garbage bins might be used to conceal a terrorist device, which is why if you do see a garbage bin, it'll often be transparent in nature so that nothing nefarious can be concealed. But by and large, the Tokyo approach seems to work because everyone wants it to.
This reminds me of an incident when our ski and snowboard group was there in February. We were walking around Harajuku and a few of us decided to indulge in a set of elaborate desserts involving crepes, various fruit-like mixtures, and an absolutely excessive amount of whipped cream. You know, the sort of thing you'd never order if you were at home.
One of us ended up wearing their dessert. He had it on his face, his chest, his hands, and somehow all over this jacket sleeves. There was whipped cream everywhere. He needed to abandon ship immediately and rid himself of what remained of his dessert. Except, there were no garbage bins anywhere! This is despite being on one of the busiest tourist streets in the city (see cover photo).
It became a mission to get himself cleaned up. But what he absolutely did not do is litter. That's just not how one conducts oneself in Japan — with or without public garbage bins.
I got a notice in the mail this week for a public meeting related to Toronto's multiplex zoning by-law. Multiplexes are house-like buildings with two, three or four dwelling units. This housing type became newly permissible across the city in May 2023, but as part of the approval, the city was asked to keep an eye on things and report back on anything that might need to be changed. What is now being proposed are amendments to this original by-law.
One change is the introduction of the term "houseplex." This is meant to get away from unit-specific terms like duplex, triplex, and fourplex; but it also sounds like it was designed to placate single-family house owners. Another proposed change is a limit on the number of bedrooms in a building. For houseplexes with three or more units, the maximum number of bedrooms is proposed to be 3 x the number of dwelling units. This is designed to block rooming houses.
It's a reminder that zoning is, at least in this part of the world, about fine-grained control. It's typically about narrowing the universe of options down to a minimum so that it's clear what we can expect. This is why zoning by-laws have things called "permitted uses." It's a strict list of things you can do. And if it's not on the list, it's off limits. A different and more flexible approach would be to do the opposite: list only what you can't do. This broadens the universe of possibilities, but gives up some control.
Roughly speaking, this is how zoning works in Japan. Land use planning starts at the national level, as opposed to being strictly delegated to local governments. And from my understanding, there are 12 main zones, ranging from exclusively low-rise residential to exclusively industrial. (
I like and agree with this tweet: "You can have bad urbanism with good architecture, and good urbanism with bad architecture." The two provided examples of this are (1) Brasilia and (2) what appears to be some random little street in Japan.
Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. It's a masterplanned city designed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in the 1950s. And it was all part of a plan to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to a more central location in the middle of the country.
The result is some incredible architecture by Oscar Niemeyer that, for me, is emblematic of the country. Brazil was one of the first countries outside of Europe to adopt modern architecture and it's precisely for this reason that Brasilia is high on my list of places to visit. (Rio is also one of my favorite cities.)
But whenever I tell a Brazilian that I want to visit the city, the usual response is, “Why?” I then have to explain that it’s because of Niemeyer and the architecture, and then they say, “Oh, okay, that makes sense. But besides the architecture, there isn’t much else to see or do there.”
Part of the reason for this could be because the city has objectively bad urbanism. When you look at it in plan view, the layout of the city resembles a plane or bird in flight, and that is, I guess, symbolically cool when you view it on Google Maps. But on the ground, cities are not at their best when they're designed around abstract symbols.
They're at their best when they're designed around people. And this is what example number two does well. The architecture is ugly and nondescript, but the street is narrow, the road is shared, and the buildings contain a mix of fine-grained uses.
It's a dead simple approach, but it works — really well. It's good urbanism.
Cover photo by Thandy Yung on Unsplash
Meaning, as you move up in allowable nuisance, things of lesser intensity still tend to be allowed. For example, just because you might have a commercial zone with restaurants and department stores, it doesn't mean you still can't build residential. It's a less intense use. At the same time, the starting point is also more permissive, because even the exclusively low-rise residential zone allows "small shops or offices." What all of this creates is a planning framework where most zones are by default mixed-use.
This is a fundamentally different approach. It relinquishes some degree of control, embraces more flexibility, and accepts that cities are chaotic living organisms. It's impossible to draw lines on a map and figure out exactly where each permitted use should go. We'll never get it right and/or keep up. What this means is that we're artificially stifling our cities by not just focusing on the obviously bad stuff (like heavy industry next to a daycare), and letting the market decide where a ramen stand should go.
Cover photo by Susann Schuster on Unsplash
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