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The Tantalizing Complexity of Tokyo

1/24/2014

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PictureBuilding with tiny footprint and artsy wall texture in Ikejiri-Ohashi, crisscrossed by utility wires.
Tokyo is arguably the greatest city in the world.  It is certainly the biggest and is a world leader in things ranging from safety (safer than Zurich) to the number of Michelin 3 star restaurants (more than Paris). 

What makes Tokyo so tantalizing to me is its unrivaled density of alluring features and its profusion of things to do and see.  The very structure of Tokyo is based upon adeptly and intensively utilizing every square meter of available space.  This intensity, flavored with Japanese culture, is the alchemy that creates this city's good life. 

The beauty of Tokyo is not the sort of beauty people associate with cities such as Paris.  Paris and Tokyo do have certain things in common, including incredible food, high culture, and general sophistication.  But Tokyo's beauty is not visible on a grand scale.  Instead it resides in the small details of every street. 

PictureStreet scene at night from Shibuya (courtesy cocoip)
These details are evident on every street you walk along.  But in Tokyo's main shopping and entertainment districts, the density of detail is like nothing you will see anywhere else.  The picture to the right shows a street in Shibuya, with signs advertising fast food, convenience stores, restaurants, karaoke boxes and pachinko parlors among many other businesses.  It's a kind of madness that plays out on multiple levels in all the multi-storied buildings.  It's quite normal to go up 6 floors to visit your favorite bar.  The strangeness to most foreigners of the written Japanese language makes Tokyo appear even madder than it is.  But reading the language is like turning on the lights!  There is so much information. 

PictureDrug store in central Tokyo.
The intensity of details and features is not skin deep.  It penetrates into most any business you enter.  You can see it in the tightly-packed 24-hour convenience stores that are everywhere.  They are brimming with products and services often unlike those in any other country, with astounding variety, including prepared Japanese foods, an enormous variety of beverages, and a broad selection of groceries and toiletries.  While living in Japan for 10 years, I was always disappointed to come home and see the relatively barren, often dirty, 7-11 stores in the US.  I wondered how they could afford to utilize their retail space so poorly. 

Drug stores are equally full of density and surprises.  The picture above shows Matsumoto Kiyoshi, one of my favorites, in Yurakucho (near Tokyo Station).  I don't believe you can find intense organization and variety like this in any store outside of Japan.  Shelves and all available spaces, literally, are carefully and artfully filled with seemingly unending products.  This product variety, I believe, is partly due to Japan having a dualistic medical system based on both Western medicine and traditional Japanese medicine (similar to Chinese medicine).  I wonder if product developers from the US and Europe come to Japan for new product ideas.  The stores are full of them!

PictureAn incredible selection of insoles to insert in shoes, at Tokyu Hands.
The retail abundance in convenience and drug stores is not an anomaly.  The remarkable cornucopia extends into many other types of businesses, from bountiful bookstores to exhaustively stocked do-it-yourself stores such as the eight-story-tall Tokyu Hands in Shibuya,. pictured at the right.

In my opinion, it's difficult to find retail rivaling Japan's abroad, at least when it comes to the variety and quality of products offered. 

I'm interested in Japan's hyper-developed retail spaces because, like Japanese cooking (which I wrote about in my last posting), they help provide a kind of framework for understanding the uniqueness of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.  They're a window into Japanese culture that showcase characteristics that permeate and define Tokyo's general physical environment and urban infrastructure.

PictureAerial view of the Ohashi Junction project.
A striking example of the Japanese approach to urban design is Ohashi Junction in Ikejiri-Ohashi.  This traffic management project includes a new covered highway interchange enmeshed in a complex of apartment buildings, retail outlets, a public library, a soccer field and a 'rooftop' park (including a rice paddy) extending along the cover of the circular junction (see the picture to the right).  This project exemplifies the detail-oriented, space intensive, innovative design that makes Tokyo unique. 

As this massive project was only minutes from where I stayed in Ikejiri-Ohashi, I had plenty of time to explore the details.  As you can see in the pictures below, very little space went to waste and high quality materials were used throughout.  I marveled at the pristine and seemingly perfect cement used throughout the structure.  If a project of this quality, complexity and innovativeness were to arise in New York or London, it would be world famous.  Nowhere else have I seen highway infrastructure so fully and tastefully integrated into the urban fabric that it actually improves a neighborhood. 

I took the elevator up to the Meguro Sky Garden above the interchange and ventured out into the lush landscaping high above the streets of Tokyo.  It was hard to imagine that I was walking on the roof of a highway junction.  The park space was comfortable, with plenty of places to sit and enjoy the view.  It was remarkable and a true green oasis in what would normally be a wasteland used only by vehicles. 

If you want to see what it's like to drive through the interchange and then further along a covered highway emerging in another part of Tokyo, check out this video.

Below are a few pictures I took on my walk around the project. 

PictureStream and diverse vegetation on the Meguro Green Promenade.
Almost directly across the street from the Ohashi Junction project is the entrance to the Meguro Green Promenade, another example of unusual design and evidence of the surprising complexity and diversity of Tokyo.  I was in Ikejiri-Ohashi because the friends I stayed with live here, and I just happened to discover these things within five minutes of their home. 

The Green Promenade runs for several kilometers along the surface of a covered portion of the Meguro River and has been designed as a peaceful oasis in the middle of this hectic city.  It is filled with biodiversity and features a little stream with crystal-clear water which provides a home for small fish, crayfish and water striders. 

The surrounding landscaping is atypical, especially for Tokyo, in that it has a high level of plant, insect and animal biodiversity.  Although I was in the center of the biggest city in the world, I saw many birds, butterflies and other insect life.  This totally artificial creation has become an important refuge for nature.   

In the video below, you can walk with me along the Promenade. I need to improve my video-taking technique, but it's a glimpse into another part of Tokyo few visitors see. 

PictureSign for Machi-ing Hongo, which works to maintain and green the neighborhood
One day I went to visit my old central-Tokyo neighborhood of Bunkyo Ward (where I lived for 10 years), and was pleased to see the evidence of citizen involvement in maintaining the urban environment. 

The sign to the right is from a local non-profit in the Hongo neighborhood. The organization works to keep the streets clean and green.  This NPO (non-profit organization) is called something like "Towning Hongo" if translated into English.  This sign illustrates the flexibility and acquisitiveness of the Japanese language.  Japanese unabashedly appropriates words, acronyms and even grammatical phrases from foreign languages with no fear of diluting itself.  The Japanese may at times be a bit xenophobic, but their language isn't.  The top line of the sign reads "NPO Corporation 'Machi-ing' Hongo.

New citizen-based movements are taking to the streets as a reaction to poor economic conditions, lower government resources and a shift away from small, private businesses to chain stores and restaurants.  The locally owned stores were apparently better neighborhood stewards. 

PictureMy friend Sachiko on the platform waiting for our train to Tochigi Prefecture.
Finally, a word on transport.  Tokyo has by far the most comprehensive and complex public transportation network in the world.   It is as dense and complex as everything else in this city but makes getting around very easy and stress-free (except, perhaps, during rush hour).  Tokyoites tend to take public transport, walk or ride their bicycles instead of driving cars. 

This city is also connected with all other major cities in Japan by the world-famous bullet train system (picture at left).  The stations and trains are spotless and trains are almost always perfectly on time. 

Below is a map of the full Tokyo metropolitan commuter rail network, including subways and the many other private rail lines Tokyoites use to get around their metro area.  There are over 1000 stations.  No system anywhere else comes close in scale. 

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Tel Aviv Biodiversity Walk

8/9/2010

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Tel Aviv suffers from an image problem, but not the sort you might expect.  Visitors from abroad are often surprised by the charms of this city.  But the stereotypically confident Israelis seem to have an inferiority complex, imagining that Tel Aviv doesn’t measure up to cities in Europe or elsewhere in the developed world.  To a guy coming from a beautiful-but-gray northern European city (the sort of place many Israelis favorably compare to Tel Aviv), I have to say Tel Aviv is an invigorating change.  In this biodiversity walk I’ll try to explain why, with a special emphasis on the green allure of Tel Aviv.

A good starting point to understanding the Tel Aviv difference is history.  It is not an ancient city, founded only in 1909.   Unlike other Mediterranean cities such as Rome, Athens or Barcelona, it is more reminiscent of an east Asian boom town but with the climate of southern California.  It is defined not by layers of organic growth over centuries, nor by stunning historical architecture, but by its cafes, bars, restaurants, beaches, and 24-hour lifestyle.  
PictureA corner cafe in the old heart of Tel Aviv - along a tree-studded street.
Old Tel Aviv, in the south, could be part of a developing world city (it wouldn’t be out of place in Mexico or Brazil) and exhibits much of what Jane Jacobs loved about the old Greenwich Village in NYC – a very living mix of small businesses, light industry and housing, crowded together into small, exuberant blocks.  I think this is the face of Tel Aviv that Israelis feel self conscious about.  One day they will realize that this is the very real heart of the city, and it is even now starting to gain attention as a trendy area in which to live and a transformation is under way…including tree planting. 

“New” Tel Aviv, in the north and surrounding suburbs, shows how far Israel has come in the last decades.  It is as clean and shiny as the best of Europe or East Asia.  And thanks to a combination of good planning and year-round sunshine, it is a green city that’s becoming greener as it grows.  Tel Aviv may just be one of the nicer places to live in the world and because of its climate and progressive orientation, it is also one of the more exciting green urban centers.  (This last week, however, could make one reconsider the climate as a strong point of Tel Aviv... my friend Marlene and I were schvitzing the whole week during an intense heat wave).    
Marlene and her family live in Tel Baruch Tzafon, a neighborhood in the northern part of Tel Aviv.  This is my base here.  It’s an upper-middle class area and the biodiversity walk starts here giving a view of the environs these Tel Aviv residents experience daily.  
The above pictures start with a view out of the window of Marlene’s apartment, onto Aharon Becker Street.  This area was built in 2001, and from the window you can see only a small portion of the green space that has been incorporated into the urban plan.  There’s a green median, planted with many drought-tolerant bushes and plants, and rather lush vegetation lines the front of all the buildings.  I imagine that as the years pass, this new development will have a beautiful canopy of shade trees covering the sidewalks and streets, significantly cooling the whole area during the hot summer.  The pictures that follow this show the impressive range of green space that’s creatively brought into housing developments in Tel Aviv.  
In every city I go to I try to find a unique characteristic of the green scene, and in Tel Aviv I think this has to be the green alleyways (I have no idea what the Israelis call them) that intersect every neighborhood I’ve visited.  These walkways, which bar cars, act as shortcuts between streets tying neighborhoods together.  They come in a variety of styles, but most seem to have wide swaths of bushes and trees on either side, and tend to be paved with bricks, creating a very inviting and intimate feeling.  The types of vegetation vary, and many of the newer developments specialize in plants that don’t require a lot of water, although there is invariably the drip irrigation hosing that is omnipresent in Israel.  I must say that I’ve been surprised to see some conventional lawn sprinklers in this country where water is so precious.  Even the Israelis can’t resists a lush green carpet of grass.  The following pictures are from several neighborhoods in the north of Tel Aviv, most highlighting these alleyways.  
Tel Aviv, and Israel as a whole, is a destination that makes you feel at home and want to return.  On my next visit I hope to visit more green projects, such as the old garbage dump in the east of Tel Aviv that is being transformed into a park.  The city has a long way to go to be at the top of heap of green cities – for example it’s missing an easy-to-use and comprehensive public transportation system and a usable web of bike paths – but from what I see, it’s definitely moving in the right direction. 

 
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Watergraafsmeer Garden

7/23/2010

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On a bike ride last weekend, I accidentally happened upon this elegant community garden in Watergraafsmeer (a section of Amsterdam).  I could find no signs with information and no workers in this well-tended site which is dominated by mature perennials now fully in bloom.  The choice and placing of the plants creates a delight for the eyes.  Soft pastels punctuated by bright yellows and deep reds lures you further along 3 parallel paths.  The whole garden is surrounded by a wall of Japanese yews.   
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Amsterdam Biodiversity Walk

7/10/2010

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Visitor impressions of Amsterdam often betray the small radius of the typical tourist itinerary.  The very tightly packed inner core of old Amsterdam, strung around a series of concentric half-circle canals, is one of the most charming city centers in the world.  But the Amsterdam of the majority of its inhabitants - the neighborhoods where most people live - is markedly different, yet quintessentially Dutch.  The structure of these neighborhoods makes it clear why Amsterdam ranks near the top in quality of life of major cities in the world. 
Squeezing a high quality life out one of the most densely populated places on earth, however, requires resourcefulness.  The Dutch make the most out of the space they have, and have somehow integrated a high level of greenery and biodiversity (and "coziness") into even the center of Amsterdam.  Other densely populated cities don't usually measure up. 
The following pictures take you on a walk through a small piece of Amsterdam, starting at my front door, through a bit of the park next door, and then on to a a close-by neighboorhood.  Here's the
tour map.
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The picture above is taken at the front of my house on Vondelstraat, right next to Vondel Park.  It's what I wake up to every morning as I get on my bicycle to go to the office - a ten-minute ride away.  The picture doesn't show clearly some small details which are indicative of many larger-scale things in Amsterdam:  the paving stones which make up the sidewalk; the carefully hand-laid brick street; the well-groomed trees; the lovingly maintained homes each with unique architectural detail; the underground and basically invisible neighborhood garbage dumpsters; and the ubiquitous bicycle racks.  Excellent design built with quality materials, intended to last and often improve with age, all integrate beautifully into a carefully planned urban fabric that stretches out in all directions and gives one a feeling of calm and well-being.   
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A gate into Vondel Park, just across the street from me.  The start of my biodiversity tour.  Note the lack of asphalt on the path.  It's simply compacted stone and sand.  Water can percolate right down through it to the roots of trees and plants. 
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This is a view over one of the many naturally overgrown canals in the park, looking onto an area inaccessible to the public.  The meadow is covered with tall plants bursting into yellow bloom.  Keep in mind that this is really in the heart of Amsterdam.  
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When trees have to be cut down, they are left on the ground, creating habitats for wildlife - not to mention a nice place to sit and take a break.   
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And not all trees are cut down when dead.  This tree has many holes in its trunk in which birds nest, including the quickly proliferating, non-native, screeching green parrots well known (and often maligned) in this park.
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The brush and twigs from cleanup in the fall and spring are laid out in long ranks, like a fence.  This not only eliminates waste but provides habitats for animals and insects. 
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Above you can see, in the middle right, some sort of waterfowl spreading its wings.  It was making a lot of noise. 
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All along the periphery a thick band of mixed vegetation insulates the park from the surrounding houses.  I saw a rabbit just near here. 
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Crossing the Overtoom, the major street behind my house, we enter a neighborhood in the Oud West section.  The scale of this area is very human, with narrow walkways surrounded by lush greenery.  I noticed a large number of swallows in the air above indicating a healthy population of airborne insects.
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The greenery extends into the canals, linking this houseboat (there are thousands of them in Amsterdam) and its colorful garden to the trees and shrubbery on the bank. 
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Often, streets are blocked (with greenery) to keep cars out.  It's easiest to get around Amsterdam by bicycle and you sense the tide has turned in this city on the encroachment of the automobile.  Pedestrians and bicyclists have priority in many areas. 
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You won't see manicured lawns on a typical Amsterdam street.  Rather freely growing flowers, bushes and trees - and the requisite bicycles - are the norm. 
This is one in a series of biodiversity walking tours I take through cities around the world.  My next major green tour will be through Tel Aviv in just a few weeks.  For more information on my new organization, CitiNature, please click on the Home and About Us tabs at the top of this page.
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Santa Cruz de Tenerife Biodiversity Short Take

5/6/2009

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With a spring-like climate year round, and a setting of rare natural beauty, Santa Cruz de Tenerife was a unexpectedly pleasant discovery for me.  I came to visit my friend Hiromi Hayashi, a Japanese food journalist who I co-wrote a book with in 1991.  She lives in Santa Cruz de Tenerife half the year - just off the pedestrian street you see above.  In no way did I expect to find the lavish attention on greenery in city planning.  Not only are most streets lined with trees, bushes and flowers, but even some buildings spill green off their sides, as you see below. 
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In the crowded center, with its narrow streets, a transformation has come about...there are trees, quality paving stones, planters everywhere, and benches for people to enjoy their beautiful city.  My impression is that much of the beautification and greening has occurred in the last decade or so.  This is Spain at its best. 
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A picture of Hiromi on the edge of a plaza near her home.
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    After nearly two decades of corporate duty, I decided to follow my heart and do what I love: make cities greener and healthier places.  Over the coming years I will be traveling to cities all over the world, reporting on what I see and learning about how even resource-poor places can improve urban lives through urban greening and greener lifestyles.  I've started the CitiNature project to channel my energies and drive initiatives supporting equal access to green amenities for everyone.
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