INFRATECTURE. The Radiant City in Japan.

[2L3] THE RADIANT CITY IN JAPAN.

"Shidami Human Science Town," Conceptualization "Sasashima Live 24" Project

Japanese city planners love the Radiant City because they can identify with its original intentions. To the Westerner, the typical Japanese city is a congested, chaotic mess which has evolved in true piecemeal fashion. City planning is actually an incredibly young profession in Japan; codes and ordinances were first implemented in most cities only a few years ago. With the incredible density and frenetic sprawl that characterize the Japanese urban experience, it is no wonder that Corbusian notions of order and ‘light, air, and greenery’ have had a tremendous influence.

Within the last decade, the Japanese industrial archipelago has become a kind of experimental test site for Western-style master planning. The vast land reclamation developments in the ports of major cities are obviously flat (a rare luxury in Japan), possess an appropriate scale, and have been provided with well-planned infrastructure, including networks of broad, rectilinear avenues – qualities which are conducive for (if not suggestive of) Utopian visions à la Le Corbusier. Existing industries and container yards have been incrementally replaced by new offices, apartments, and commercial and entertainment facilities. These new developments hardly resemble Japanese cities at all. In fact, the Japanese consider the artificial islands and people who live and work there to be foreign.

Tokyo Teleport Town In Tokyo’s ‘Teleport Town’, which I mentioned earlier, one is struck by the diverse collection of office and residential high-rises set within a wide, grassy plain. A new monorail and suspension bridge provide easy commuter service to the island, which is often visited as a theme park attraction by incredulous Japanese. Even to a Western visitor, the ample spaces which separate the isolated structures appear empty and desolate; the entire scene is like a variation on a De Chirico painting. Nothing, in fact, could seem less Japanese, yet this kind of urban vision is embraced like so many other Western influences.

Port Island and Rokko Island (named after Rokko Mountain, from which landfill was removed to build it) in Kobe were designed to have a diversity of functions from the outset. They closely resemble variations on the Plan Voisin and Ville Radieuse, with central office towers separated by a grand plaza, surrounded by residential high-rises and schools in well-landscaped yards, which in turn are surrounded by a continuous green belt. Outside of the green belt, at the perimeter of the islands, are working factories and container terminals, which can be heard clanking away from a safe distance. For any student familiar with urban design and planning, these islands represent astonishing manifestations of Howard’s Garden City as well as Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow. Naturally, it is no less astonishing to know that they are built on artificial islands. They may in fact be the closest realizations of Utopia that we have seen.

Port Island and Rokko Island, Kobe Considering the population crunch and scarcity of land in Japan, what practical sense is there in emulating models of ideal Western cities, which seem strangely inappropriate in that context? Albert Pope made the wise suggestion that the artificial islands could support much higher levels of density, given the ample open spaces provided by the sea, and that much-needed pockets of space could be created retroactively within the congested fabric of the mainland. In any event, the Japanese might profit more by continuing to develop cities their way, based on the piecemeal, ‘organic’ evolution of infrastructures within confined spaces. Despite the fact that many consider the results of this kind of growth ugly or haphazard, as Yoshinobu Ashihara states in his book The Hidden Order, the bottom line is that the Japanese city works: "The [Japanese] townscape built for shade and cool breezes has an ambiguity not found in the West, but it is endowed with a warmth and friendliness all its own. The crowded conditions and diverse architectural styles that coexist in Japanese cities may not be very attractive in form, but in content they embrace a certain hidden order. It is that hidden order that makes possible the vitality and prosperity of our cities today."⁷¹

⁷¹Ashihara, Yoshinobu, The Hidden Order: Tokyo through the Twentieth Century, Trans. Lynne E. Riggs (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989) p. 133-134

Images: 1. "Shidami Human Science Town," Conceptualization, 2. "Sasashima Live 24" Project, 3. Tokyo Teleport Town, 4. Port Island and Rokko Island, Kobe

A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell.