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.
Yesterday afternoon and evening was a series of interesting discussions about city building in Toronto. First, I met with Jeff Ranson of Northcrest Developments for a tour of YZD. This is the 370-acre former Downsview Airport lands that is now the biggest urban redevelopment project in North America.
The tour also involved the two of us e-scootering around the property, which was timely given yesterday's post about not hating on them so much. Jeff is up next on Globizen's Global City Builder series, so stay tuned for that.
After that I was on Ben Myers' Toronto Under Construction podcast. After 80+ episodes, he finally invited me to join (wink wink). It was a great discussion with Rob Spanier of the Spanier Group and Ilana Altman of The Bentway. When the link comes out, I'll be sure to share it on the blog.
But one of the common threads across both discussions, that I'm now thinking about, is about how city builders can better provision for flexibility in new urban projects. Flexibility is an important feature because cities need to be able to grow and adapt over time.
Consider some of the older main streets in Toronto where it's very clear that the shop or restaurant you're in used to be someone's home that has now been converted. This is a very good outcome. It's the city iterating.
But this isn't always possible with newer developments. Condominium corporations, land use restrictions, and a variety of other factors can make this largely impossible. It's for this reason that I'm always drawn to things like live/work suites. They already contemplate a greater degree of flexibility.
Two specific examples that come to mind are the live/work suites fronting onto Fort York Boulevard (in CityPlace), which have over time become more retail oriented, and loft buildings like 90 Sumach Street, which is known for housing a lot of creative professionals.
Cities are at their best when they are able to change and adapt. So I think it behooves us to spend more time thinking about how we can encourage greater flexibility through different design approaches, flexible land use permissions, legal carveouts, and whatever else might be necessary to fully unlock the potential of our cities.
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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