Low-rise Tokyo

For all you hear about Tokyo's lack of space, high cost, micro apartments and living quarters, there is another, low-rise side of Tokyo no one talks about, AND the reason behind the movement to smaller and smaller housing units outside the central city.  This is information I did not have before and confirms the fact that (most) humans the world over like space and privacy.  

On the Cherry Blossom by A.L.X. in Itabashi ward challenges gravity while still 

meeting earthquake regulations. Photo: Jérémie Souteyrat

Tokyo Houses

For one of the most populous cities in the world, Tokyo is remarkably low-rise.   ...vast swaths of the city are covered with detached dwellings in which middle-class Japanese live out their lives.  

Reflexion in Mineral by
Atelier Tekuto in Nakano
ward is on a 44-square-metre
corner plot. Photo: Jérémie Souteyrat

A new book by Tokyo-based French photographer Jérémie Souteyrat, tokyo no ie (Tokyo Houses), explores a quiet world of suburban living. Its pages and photographs provide a huge contrast to the frenetic pace at which the world’s third-largest economy is often perceived to live.

Finding the exceptional in small is also a response to another Japanese phenomenon: a punishing inheritance tax regime that effectively halves the size of a plot of land each generation as families sell to meet their revenue obligations.

Tokyo Houses shows big population doesn’t have to mean high-rise. For an Australia debating the seemingly binary choice between soaring towers or endless, flat suburbs, that’s a welcome third way.

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Within the book review is this ideal city form that urban planners from all over are buying into, in spite of the fact that people are continuing to choose to live in less exalted, but far more realistic and preferable ways.  The world can handle both the urbanites AND the suburbanites.  If they can do it in Japan, we can do it in Oregon!