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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
[1L3] INDUSTRIAL ARCHIPELAGO. Faced with worsening congestion in their cities, the Japanese have had two practical choices for urban expansion: the hinterland, and the sea. As I mentioned earlier, over two-thirds of Japan is mountainous, and the steep foothills that surround every Japanese city make rural expansion problematic. Japanese builders and engineers have proven themselves to be exceedingly industrious, however, as indicated by the impressive railroad and highway systems which connect every major city, for which extensive networks of tunnels and bridges had to be built. Because mountainous terrain typically rises sharply from the alluvial plains, however, large-scale hillside developments have proven very difficult and costly. As a result, a large percentage of commuters must live one or two hours from their workplace in a major city, because the superior infrastructural network allows them to do so.
Until recently, the purpose of land reclamation in Japan has been to support heavy industry and trade. Much of Japan’s post-war economic success has been attributed to the expert transformation of imported raw materials into immediately marketable export goods. Today, Japan imports as much as 80 percent of its natural resources; thus, it has made practical sense for centers of production to be intimately linked with port distribution systems. Moreover, due to the vast space requirements and zoning concerns of factories and power plants, it has been equally practical to build such facilities away from city centers and tightly-packed residential neighborhoods. Therefore, iron, steel, and shipbuilding industries, as well as automotive, petrochemical, precision machinery, and electrical and optical equipment industries constitute vast territories of artificial landfill outside major Japanese cities, and are located adjacent to container yards and shipping/distribution centers. As such, mixed-use waterfront development which has become increasingly popular in Western coastal cities (such as New York’s Battery Park City or London’s Docklands) has been practically nonexistent in Japan. But the situation is changing.
Lately, Japan has been experiencing a hollowing out of its industry based on a shift of manufacturing jobs overseas; a change which seems to follow the natural evolution of economic development in other first world countries, from primary industries (agriculture, forestry, fisheries), to secondary industries (mining, manufacturing, construction), to tertiary industries (transportation, communications, retail and wholesale trade, banking, finance and real estate, business services, personal services, and public administration).14 The change in Japan’s industrial structure has thus led to physical transformations in its cities, most notably in the port areas.
Abandoned only months before its scheduled opening due to a political controversy, the World City Exposition, 1996 was planned to show off Tokyo’s latest architectural wonders on a string of manmade islands called ‘Teleport Town’. Among the many innovative projects to be seen were Nippon Sogo’s Telecom Center, Katsuhiro Kobayashi’s mixed use development/recycling plant called Ariake Clean Center, Kenzo Tange’s giant lattice-like Fuji Television Building, and Sato Corporation’s Tokyo International Exhibition Center and Congress Tower. About 25 kilometers to the southwest of Tokyo lies Minato Mirai 21 (or port future 21), at the mouth of Yokohama. In 1992, a group of architects and planners (including OMA) was invited to propose designs for a collection of five sites along the coast which could be redeveloped to form a ring five kilometers in diameter. Yokohama plans to host an exhibition in the next decade similar to the failed Urban Frontier project in Tokyo, 1996.
14Japan: Profile of a Nation (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995) p. 155-156 15I should note that these particular projects were original in nature, and did not involve retrofitting existing sites. Images: 1. Development of the Fukuoka Coastline, 2. Nagoya Port Container Yards, 3. Future Nagoya International Airport, 4. Kenzo Tange, Tokyo Plan (1960), 5. Renzo Piano, Kansai Airport (1994)
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The sea has
proven to be viable territory for urban expansion. Despite the high cost and labor
involved with so-called land reclamation projects, the Japanese have demonstrated that
land is valuable enough to warrant seaward expansion of an unprecedented scale. Every
coastal city in Japan has a highly-developed port built on landfill; in fact, it is rare
today for one to see natural Japanese coastline, particularly on the Eastern seaboard. In
Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagoya, land reclamation has actually moved the original
waterline many kilometers away from its original location. Preserved gateways and shrines
which once marked the entrance to cities hundreds of years ago are now surrounded by dense
development, separated from water by entire urban districts.
In an atavistic reoccurrence of Metabolist
aspirations, city planners, developers, and architects are projecting new Utopian
waterfront cities with gleaming office towers, hotels, exhibition halls, apartment blocks,
shopping centers, parks, and amusement complexes. Outmoded steel plants are being
demolished to make way for new financial and service institutions, housing, and cultural
amenities. Despite the danger of liquefaction of landfill in the event of an earthquake,
in addition to the necessary environmental cleanup of industrial sites, the artificial
island is an attractive site for new urban development of this kind, when one considers
its characteristically flat, generously-scaled spaces, well-organized street grid, and
proximity to water. There has even been enough unoccupied land (used for shipping yards
and distribution facilities) in the Japanese industrial
archipelago that it presents a veritable tabula rasa for new planning. Indeed,
one can easily decipher the sharp contrast between the disorderly urban congestion of the
mainland and the highly-structured agoraphobia of the reclaimed landscape.
Perhaps
the most well-known Utopian land reclamation scheme is Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Plan of
1960, in which he envisioned a marine city in the form of a linear complex of highways
leading from the concentric core of Tokyo to Chiba across the bay. The plan intended to
improve infrastructural problems and augment a dwindling housing supply within a model
city for the coming ‘information society’. The megastructural office and housing
blocks were designed collaboratively by URTEC, a team of architects and engineers which
Tange founded in 1961. Tange’s Tokyo Plan of 1986, a revision of the 1960 scheme,
proposed the development of a multi-core urban zone with two new sub-cities, one along the
coast and one in the bay. The next phase will involve extending the projected axis further
to meet Kizaru on the opposite shore. Looking at Tokyo today, it is fascinating to see the
extent of Tange’s influence on the development of the coastline.
Other well-known examples of innovative uses for land reclamation sites
include Kobe’s Port Island and Rokko Island (1990), Yokohama’s Nexus World
project (1991), and Osaka’s Kansai International Airport (1994), which was built on
an 510-hectare artificial island five kilometers from shore.15
A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
