18. From Lockdown to Slowdown: Tokyo as Slowdown City
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Covid 19, Tokyo, Climate Change, Coronavirus, Urban Planning

18. From Lockdown to Slowdown: Tokyo as Slowdown City

Polka dot city Tokyo as an exemplar of ‘Slowdown’ theory, as the world’s largest and smallest city, and as a case study for others post-Covid-19.

“Slowdown is not an end of history or the coming of salvation. We are not heading toward a utopia, although life for most people may be less precarious, with better housing, education, and less onerous work than in the recent past. We are heading for stability. Stability may be a little boring, like Pittsburgh, Stockholm, Kyoto, Helsinki, Ottawa, or Oslo, especially if you are hankering after excitement and bright lights.” — Danny Dorling, Slowdown (2020)

Having lived happily in two of those “boring” places, and with a fondness for at least two more in the list, I’m questioning my own sense of self a little. But as Dorling points out, just as we will always find things to worry about — that is something we are intrinsically good at, as a species — we will always be able to generate a little tension in an otherwise stable city, to lose ourselves in the darkness on the edge of town.

For example, as well as the list above, Dorling uses another city as an archetypal example of Slowdown, a city that also exemplifies the polka dot city motif used in this series: Tokyo. Arguably the world’s biggest megacity, and to many visitors utterly bewildering in its scale and dynamism, Tokyo is a constantly churning urban experiment, with its own particular metabolism enabling it to constantly change and thrive. Yet the city precisely exemplifies the Slowdown, and revels in the small and the quiet. It is worth dwelling, briefly at least, on some of the patterns of lived experience forged by the city, or that forge the city, and noting their relationship to the previous papers in this series.

This is not to say we should all Be More Tokyo. The place is unique, as all places are, and its value would resist copy-pasting. Yet as an Asian megacity Tokyo encourages us not to fall into the trap of valorising the usual European ‘compact city’ examples, the more obviously smaller, slower, and more sustainable cities that I draw on as much as anyone else. Should you need it, I’ve recently written about European cities and streets like Paris, Oslo, Utrecht and so on, and how they are supported by their smaller, lighter, more active mobility systems, post-car, as well as alternative housing models that can unlock different forms of neighbourhood. Many cities and places smaller than Tokyo are moving rapidly to retrofit their streets during the lockdown, tactically at least, perhaps getting a headstart on the Slowdown. But Tokyo provides an almost extreme alternative compared to these examples, akin to being a lead user in design methodology.

Please note: this is not an attempt in-depth piece at all. I recall reading Thomas Campanella’s book about Chinese urban development, The Concrete Dragon, which starts with the author’s reflection that each time he visited China, he realised he knew less and less about the place. Japan can have that effect on the gaijin too. Rather, this piece is a skim across some aspects that align with Danny Dorling picking out the city in his last chapter of his book Slowdown, and that also align with the small pieces, loosely joined polka dot patterns I’ve been sketching in this second batch of Slowdown Papers. I’ve written more in-depth pieces on some of the architecture, neighbourhoods, and metabolism of Tokyo, with respect to Sou Fujimoto’s House NA and Ryue Nishizawa’s Moriyama House, and on the mobility cultures that frame Tokyo’s streets, as part of this mini-series. Perhaps read those first. Or later! And for more detail from eyes on the ground, the work of Darko Radovic and Davisi Boontharm at Keio University is worth exploring (see below).

And as geographer Paul Waley notes, writing in 2012 for his preface to ‘Small Tokyo’ (again, reference below), we cannot take for granted that the patterns that produced this version of Tokyo will necessarily continue. He writes:

“Small Tokyo is a struggle, and in many respects it is a losing struggle.” —Paul Waley, preface to ‘Small Tokyo’, Darko Radovic and Davisi Boontharm (2012)

Yet Waley continues, “In a funny sort of way, however, Tokyo’s upwards explosion over the last three decades or so has intensified our appreciation of its smallness. The contrast accentuates the smallness of so many of the city’s buildings and the intimate nature of so many of its spaces.” And now, in 2020, in the context of an examplar Slowdown city according to Dorling (not least following lockdown conditions), that upwards explosion will have become difficult to justify. It is the smallness and slowness of Tokyo that may well persist, in its own uniquely complex way—yet only if we are aware of it, and appreciate it as Waley suggests. And in the same way, perhaps, some aspects of the lockdown might intensify our appreciation of the potential in the slowdown.

First of all, this distributed polka dot pattern that this series returns to. There is no discernible meaning to the centre of Tokyo (Tokyo Station is not really it) but instead, the city is pinned-up on dozens, hundreds of sub-centres, mini-neighbourhoods with agglomerations of higher density around their subway stations, which after the protective firebreak of tall-ish buildings, drops quickly to humble but beautifully human-scale side-streets. No particular single central business district rules over the others, and the neighbourhood currently in vogue can apparently shift with the wind. Yet each area seems to retain its values, character, and function within the city, one way or another.