Secrets of Japanese Urbanism: Why Japanese Cities Are Such Nice Places to Live

Briefly, I attributed the awesomeness of Japanese cities to:

• Zoning that tells you what you can’t build in an area, instead of what you can build, which allows most areas to have shops and restaurants

• Zoning that forces shops and restaurants to be smaller in more residential areas

• Policies to promote small, independent retail businesses over large ones

• Public safety

• Noiseproofing and noise ordinances

• Excellent trains

• Nice public spaces

That list was, of course, pretty reductionist. You could implement those same policies elsewhere in the world, and while you might get a really awesome city, it would still be very different from Tokyo. There’s a huge amount of historical context involved in how Japanese cities became the way they are — events like World War 2, planning choices, cultural preferences and aesthetic style, business and government institutions, broader economic policies, and so on. (...)

Zakkyo buildings

Most of the iconic photos you see of Tokyo involve a whole bunch of colorful densely packed electric signs running up and down the front of narrow buildings. For example:

These are called zakkyo buildings. The word roughly translates to “miscellaneous”. They contain a whole bunch of small retail businesses — restaurants, bars, retail outlets, schools, health care offices, whatever. Sometimes there are dozens of these in a single building. None of the businesses are related to each other; you just rent out a space in a zakkyo.

The distinctive look of a zakkyo building — and from whole streets of zakkyo buildings packed together — comes from Japanese architectural codes. Building tall-ish, narrow buildings was a way to maximize usable floor space within the rules of the postwar period. Japanese laws also allow for a lot of different types of businesses to coexist in any given space — there are basically no regulations on serving alcohol. Some buildings also have external elevators and/or staircases, which makes it easy to get up to a top-floor store from the street.

But perhaps most importantly, Japanese regulations were and are very lenient about allowing a bunch of electric signs, including signs that hang out into the street. Even as Simon and Garfunkel were decrying the “neon god” of urban modernity, Japan was embracing a libertarian approach to small business. Putting a restaurant on the 4th floor of a building often only makes sense if you can inform passing pedestrians that there’s a restaurant up there — which means having a big glowing sign.

Add these all up, and it made economic sense to cram a whole bunch of small businesses into the upper floors of buildings in the city center. So Japan did. And in doing so, it created one of the world’s most distinctive and beautiful modern urban landscapes, even as other cities’ old-fashioned aesthetic preferences caused them to restrict electric signage. Now people come from all over the world to take pictures of Tokyo’s beautiful streetscapes.

But zakkyo buildings have a benefit that goes way beyond aesthetics. When you can stack a bunch of retail businesses vertically, you can cram a whole lot of retail into a very small part of a city. Those retail centers — think of central Shibuya, Shinjuku, etc. — become very crowded with foot traffic.

But that allows more residential areas of the city to be leafy and quiet, even if they’re only a few blocks away! It takes only a few minutes’ walk from the intersection above to reach a quiet backstreet lined with houses.

In dense cities where retail is largely confined to the first floors of buildings, the retail has to be much more spread out throughout the city. This means that if you’re going shopping, you have to walk or take a train long distances in order to see a whole bunch of different stores. It also means that a lot of people’s apartments are located above noisy retail outlets and crowded streets.

In other words, NYC and other dense cities could use some zakkyo buildings. Allow external electric signs and easy street access to top floors, and you allow retail to concentrate vertically instead of having to sprawl across the city. You get the benefit of incredible variety for shoppers, even as you spare a lot of people’s apartment buildings the sounds of tramping feet, shouting voices, delivery trucks, and slamming car doors.

Also, it just looks pretty darn cool. (...)

Japan’s secret sauce is small business

Greater Tokyo has 160,000 restaurants. The New York City metropolitan area has 25,000. The Paris metropolitan area has only 13,000. Tokyo has a larger population, but even after accounting for that, it has well over twice the variety of eating establishments that NYC has. Most of these are small businesses rather than big chains. This turns out to be essential not just to Japan’s excellent urbanism, but to Japan’s middle class as well.

Most of Emergent Tokyo is dedicated to discussing Japan’s unique commercial spaces — yokocho, undertrack arcades, and so on. (...)

For every single one of these cases, the story is the same. The space thrives because of high commercial density — a massive variety of businesses packed into a small area. As I wrote in my previous post, commercial density is massively under-discussed. It allows for variety — in Japan, when you go out to eat, there are a million restaurants to choose from, and they’re all near each other. When you go clothes shopping, there are a million little boutiques to try, and they’re all near each other. This massively enhances the shopping experience.

But it’s not just variety; it’s uniqueness. If you went into a zakkyo building and everything was just an Olive Garden, a Starbucks, or a 24 Hour Fitness, it would get pretty boring after a while. The romance of urban Japan is that there are always a bunch of completely new places to discover, and so it’s always worth walking around and discovering stuff.

And that couldn’t happen unless there were a huge number of people who wanted to start small businesses. Every single commercial space that Emergent Tokyo talks about — the yokocho, the zakkyo, the undertrack arcades — depends on a bunch of small businesses wanting to locate there. If that demand isn’t there, the spaces will either go unfilled or be filled by chains. And without the small business associations to band together and resist redevelopment pressures, Japan’s most iconic urban spaces will eventually be turned into boring corporate malls — not because of the disembodied evils of capitalism, but simply because without small businesses, there’s not much to do with that space except put a boring corporate mall there. (...)

Besides making urban environments pleasant and exciting, it seems to me that small business owners provide a crucial constituency for many of the essential ingredients of Japanese urbanism.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: Jaison Lin; Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash