Many of you probably didn't click through on this link in yesterday's post, but it was a link to a book called Emergent Tokyo -- Designing the Spontaneous City. What this book is largely about is the idea that Tokyo -- usually considered to be the largest urban region in the world -- is more the result of bottom-up actions than top-down actions. In other words, it is a kind of complex and self-organizing system.

Some of you may be reading this and thinking that the result would be chaos. But the opposite is, in fact, true. Despite being the largest urban agglomeration in the world, Tokyo is consistently viewed as one of the most livable big cities in the world. How is that possible?

One topic that we've been talking about on this blog recently is the planning approach of mandating ground-floor retail in new developments. While certainly good intentioned, this is one example of top-down planning. We are saying, "retail needs to go here because."

The problem, as we have talked about, is that the market may not want it. It may not actually be viable or desirable. Of course, it is a delicate situation. Because if you don't provision for it, then you might block it from ever being possible on sites where it clearly makes sense. (We spoke specifically about this, here.)

There is also the opposite question of: where are we not allowing retail?

Maybe there are places where retail activity would be viable today, except it's currently not permitted. One concrete example of this is Toronto's laneways. Right now, we only allow residential (throughout our "Neighbourhoods"). But there many people, including myself and planner Blair Scorgie, who have been arguing that they should be mixed-use:

Would office and retail uses actually work in Toronto's residential laneways? I frankly don't know. Because they're not allowed today, it's largely impossible to know. If we allowed these uses and nothing happened, then we'd have a better idea that there's little demand for it. (I say a better idea because there still could be other obstacles in the way.)

On the other hand if we decided to mandate non-residential uses in our laneways and nobody did anything, two things might then happen. One, we'd be similarly led to believe that there's little to no demand. And two, we'd probably be sacrificing the residential use, for which we can say today there is clear demand.

There are also the considerations that demand will almost certainly change over time and be inconsistent across different locations. For instance, maybe retail doesn't work in this laneway, but it will work in that laneway. Can we actually plan for this?

Top-down approaches generally assume that we know all or many of the answers. It presumes that we know that this street should have ground-floor retail and this street should not. It's also about control. More bottom-up approaches admit that it's impossible to plan for everything and that there could be latent potential that we're not even thinking about.

Of course, there is something naturally unsettling about this approach because it is, by definition, unknowable. And it relinquishes a certain amount of control. Maybe a restaurant will appear here or maybe it won't. Maybe someone will open a small office in this laneway or maybe they won't. Either way, the potential for change exists.

But I think this should be seen as empowering, transparent, and highly efficient. It is a way of reducing the barriers to entry and allowing more urban creativity and ambition to shrine through. I believe, for example, that if we made it easier, cheaper, and possible to open a small restaurant (perhaps in a laneway), we would have more and overall better restaurants in the city.

And as we have seen in the case of Tokyo, the result of more flexibility is not necessarily chaos. It can be a highly livable city that has people wondering, "how did they manage to plan such a large city so well?"

Photo by Kentaro Toma on Unsplash

I just ordered a copy of this book. So I haven't read it yet. But I did just read this Q&A with the authors (and it clearly piqued interested). The central idea is that Tokyo -- which is a massive city that is famous for somehow being both massive and exceedingly livable -- is the product of something that the authors refer to as emergent urbanism.

What they mean by this is that Tokyo's order, functionality, and livability is actually largely the result of emergent bottom-up actions, rather than top-down central planning. This isn't to say that some top-down planning isn't required for things like parks and transit. You still need some of that. But this is to say that Tokyo's approach to urbanism is very different from what you'll find in cities likes Paris and many others.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about (taken from the above Q&A):

This is going to sound wild to anyone who lives in the US, but for any two-story rowhouse in Tokyo, the owner can by right operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor — even in the most residential zoned sections of the city. That means you have an incredible supply of potential microspaces. Any elderly homeowner could decide to rent out the bottom floor of their place to some young kid who wants to start a coffee shop, for example. When you look at what we call yokocho alleyways — charming, dingy alleyways that grew out of the black markets post-World War II, which are some of the the most iconic and beloved sections of the city now — it’s all of these tiny little bars and restaurants just crammed into every available space.

What's fascinating about all of this is that we're talking about a kind of self-organizing urbanism. One that goes against everything that traditional city planning stands for. Using the above example, instead of saying that retail should go here, bars should go here, and residences should go only over here, Tokyo is basically saying you can do whatever you'd like.

If you'd like to open a tiny 4-seater bar that only serves Long Island iced teas to people wearing cosplay outfits on neon pink plastic chairs, you are free to do that. Oh, and by the way, we're also going to make it a lot easier and cheaper for you to get a liquor license. This might sound chaotic, but it works for Tokyo. And it's evidence that maybe a lot of our cities would be better off if only we let them be what they want to be.