The point about the shared lawn without much to do in that lawn, vs having tons of restaurants, cafes, bars, and stores in a neighborhood being incredibly freeing, is something I think a lot of urbanism activists in the US miss. There's a really strong anti-business segment of the US urbanism crowd that is vehemently opposed to shared spaces that people pay to use. I think that daily life in Tokyo really shows how business and good urbanism are absolutely not enemies.
In addition, something almost completely missing from the urbanism discussion in the West, is integrating industrial uses in dense urban environments. I work at a small industrial company, and it's so nice to be able to walk not only to my office, but also to my company's labs and workshops in the same neighborhood. Not every industrial building is an oil refinery or a rocket static firing range. Even though a sizable lab or workshop, or small factory or warehouse does present a longer than optimal blank wall to the street, they can fit well enough, and people working jobs that aren't office or retail should be able to live and work in nice neighborhoods.
Though on the topic of safety, I think improving the safety of US cities is very important. Even though NYC is fairly safe by US standards, it could be an order of magnitude better and still be short of world leaders. I really enjoyed your article a while back about Professionalizing the Police, and would be interested in hearing a more complete argument in why and how to improve safety in US cities. It feels like the safety debate in the US was stuck between the "law and order" types with mostly bad ideas about how to improve law and order, and "defund the police (literally)" types whose only response to legitimate safety concerns is gaslighting.
As a European who has lived all over the US for the past 14 years, this is what frustrates me: there’s clear market demand for mixed use development, since the cities and neighborhoods where it exists are always the most expensive to buy or rent a home.
I’m not just talking about New York and San Francisco, but the cute little historic main street of any American town you choose, where mixed use is grandfathered in. Why does modern planning prohibit the sensible kind of living that our ancestors figured out a thousand years ago?
It always strikes me as weird when people talk about exclusively residential areas as “neighborhoods”. To me it doesn’t feel like a “neighborhood” unless you see your neighbors, which requires at least a strip of small shops in walking distance or something.
I sometimes like to say that many Americans treat their car like a hijab - it’s embarrassing to be seen in public without being shielded from view by this covering. You can go to a private space and take it off, but walking down the street with your face visible feels risky.
I live in Saigon, which has a thriving 24 hour culture, where you can find people sitting out cafes 24 hours a day.
(There are maybe 8-10 cafes within a 5 minute walk of my house.)
While obviously weather and culture are part of that, a big part is just that people have very little living space. Multi-generational homes and single resident occupancy means a lot of people live in the equivalent of a dorm room. Obviously you're going to prefer meeting friends at a cafe.
American homes, by contrast, feel more like a self-sufficient citadel ready to withstand a month long siege after a stop at Costco. I think there's a reason why preppers are overwhelmingly an American phenomenon.
That’s a great point about noise, and one of the least appreciated benefits of the switch to EVs.
Still think that Tokyo, at least, is desperately short of neighbourhood parks with greenery, which would be a major impediment to me enjoying life there.
I'd add that in middle-ring Tokyo _everything_ is small: very diverse land use and activities (not especially pretty) often referred to as fine-grained: tight buildings, minuscule shops and restaurants, narrow streets, narrow sidewalks, narrow at-grade railroads, narrow rail stations and crossings with boom gates -- all of which our 'first world' standards would prevent -- and a powerful and prevailing sense of neighborhood and family and civic life.
It's a bit like the older parts of all cities.
A bit like the Boston that Jane Jacobs described.
But creating a spontaneous feeling of a lived-in neighborhood seems to be incredibly hard in contemporary affluent cities where the scale of buildings, streets, everything, is fairly gross.
It's interesting that Tokyo's dense and efficient rail network is owned by multiple private companies running separate lines and stations which interconnect in many ad hoc ways.
One other thing, regarding housing demand and supply in Tokyo: the population of the metro region is shrinking. The problem for metro planners in Tokyo (and elsewhere in Japan) is that there's already more of everything than is needed.
Might Sapporo and other cities in Hokkaido be useful for providing lessons for American planners, given that they were built in the 19th century and thus have street grids that aren't too dissimilar to those of Texan cities?
Japan sounds lovely. City dwelling is not for me - I get drained by the hustle and bustle - but making city dwelling closer to the Japanese model as you describe it would certainly, I think, make it better for those who enjoy it.
As a kid I thought trains and cars were both cool - I grew up in Jersey where the train is how you get to Philly and NYC and my dad rode it to work, so it was normal to me. But I LOVED cars.
Then I went to Japan and...trains are better. I still like both - which makes me only mostly urbanist - but the way Japan designed itself around trains was just so pleasant. The way everything happens at the convenience store, the way your little apartment feels cozy but you do your living in the town - it did feel better. Even the smallest towns are typically connected to the rail network and centered on the station - except maybe Shikoku, where they're centered on a bus stop. But they all have a nice little downtown plaza of restaurants that everyone can walk to, and some people drive or bike. It's just so well designed to live in and enjoy. You describe it and capture it so well.
And yea, I loved Japan. I am an American, and have settled and put roots down here, and there are a ton of things culturally and personally that make me prefer living here. But man I'm so happy I got to live there and I'd love to export so much of that Japanese mindset for how a town and city are built back this way.
Some people have the experience of a vacation where they get a small pricey hotel in the downtown area of a city and go out to eat every night. Imagine that, but not expensive, so it's all the time!
Another case of the heuristic "abundance feels like doing what a rich person does without being rich."
See also Matt Yglesias' commentaries on being an urban parent. You have all these parks and playgrounds, shows and activity spaces, well beyond what you can fit in your home and with way more connections to other local parents.
Great post! I've lived w/o a car in both WDC & SF, and it was great, just as you describe Japan. And my son & daughter have lived in Chicago & Sommerville, MA, without cars, enjoying the same warmth & convenience. Where I live now, an inner WDC burb, if could walk to shopping & restaurants, if I could safely cross a major thoroughfare. Sadly, I can't. We drive the two blocks! But there's space around the corner big enough for an ethnic grocery; so I have my fingers crossed.
Noah's point about the Large-Scale Retail Store Act is really interesting. I remember American negotiators trying to get that legislation relaxed in the 1990s, based on the (probably deluded) idea that it was a "non-tariff trade barrier" and that large chains would sell more imported US products.
Even if you're an admirer of the free market, it seems possible that the law has increased economic efficiency on net, because as long as it's in place they can't use zoning to exclude small stores. (In other words, the alternative to this regulation would be other, worse forms of regulation.) Someone should try to model that idea more rigorously.
Your description of a Japanese neighborhood sounds exactly like my experience of Greenwich Village, where I lived 1968- 1975. It also reflects the key points made in the classic study of urbanism: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs.
Enlightening article. I'd add that Manhattan, like Tokyo, has accessible, communal green space in the form of Central park, which is 840 acres (out of 15,000) in the middle of the island.
The point about the shared lawn without much to do in that lawn, vs having tons of restaurants, cafes, bars, and stores in a neighborhood being incredibly freeing, is something I think a lot of urbanism activists in the US miss. There's a really strong anti-business segment of the US urbanism crowd that is vehemently opposed to shared spaces that people pay to use. I think that daily life in Tokyo really shows how business and good urbanism are absolutely not enemies.
In addition, something almost completely missing from the urbanism discussion in the West, is integrating industrial uses in dense urban environments. I work at a small industrial company, and it's so nice to be able to walk not only to my office, but also to my company's labs and workshops in the same neighborhood. Not every industrial building is an oil refinery or a rocket static firing range. Even though a sizable lab or workshop, or small factory or warehouse does present a longer than optimal blank wall to the street, they can fit well enough, and people working jobs that aren't office or retail should be able to live and work in nice neighborhoods.
Though on the topic of safety, I think improving the safety of US cities is very important. Even though NYC is fairly safe by US standards, it could be an order of magnitude better and still be short of world leaders. I really enjoyed your article a while back about Professionalizing the Police, and would be interested in hearing a more complete argument in why and how to improve safety in US cities. It feels like the safety debate in the US was stuck between the "law and order" types with mostly bad ideas about how to improve law and order, and "defund the police (literally)" types whose only response to legitimate safety concerns is gaslighting.
As a European who has lived all over the US for the past 14 years, this is what frustrates me: there’s clear market demand for mixed use development, since the cities and neighborhoods where it exists are always the most expensive to buy or rent a home.
I’m not just talking about New York and San Francisco, but the cute little historic main street of any American town you choose, where mixed use is grandfathered in. Why does modern planning prohibit the sensible kind of living that our ancestors figured out a thousand years ago?
So many Americans are afraid of turning their cities into Manhattan that they accidentally turned their cities into LA
It always strikes me as weird when people talk about exclusively residential areas as “neighborhoods”. To me it doesn’t feel like a “neighborhood” unless you see your neighbors, which requires at least a strip of small shops in walking distance or something.
I sometimes like to say that many Americans treat their car like a hijab - it’s embarrassing to be seen in public without being shielded from view by this covering. You can go to a private space and take it off, but walking down the street with your face visible feels risky.
I live in Saigon, which has a thriving 24 hour culture, where you can find people sitting out cafes 24 hours a day.
(There are maybe 8-10 cafes within a 5 minute walk of my house.)
While obviously weather and culture are part of that, a big part is just that people have very little living space. Multi-generational homes and single resident occupancy means a lot of people live in the equivalent of a dorm room. Obviously you're going to prefer meeting friends at a cafe.
American homes, by contrast, feel more like a self-sufficient citadel ready to withstand a month long siege after a stop at Costco. I think there's a reason why preppers are overwhelmingly an American phenomenon.
That’s a great point about noise, and one of the least appreciated benefits of the switch to EVs.
Still think that Tokyo, at least, is desperately short of neighbourhood parks with greenery, which would be a major impediment to me enjoying life there.
Reading this made me think of how nice it would be to have a little coffee shop or something in my residential neighborhood.
I like that a lot.
As an urban planner.
I'd add that in middle-ring Tokyo _everything_ is small: very diverse land use and activities (not especially pretty) often referred to as fine-grained: tight buildings, minuscule shops and restaurants, narrow streets, narrow sidewalks, narrow at-grade railroads, narrow rail stations and crossings with boom gates -- all of which our 'first world' standards would prevent -- and a powerful and prevailing sense of neighborhood and family and civic life.
It's a bit like the older parts of all cities.
A bit like the Boston that Jane Jacobs described.
But creating a spontaneous feeling of a lived-in neighborhood seems to be incredibly hard in contemporary affluent cities where the scale of buildings, streets, everything, is fairly gross.
It's interesting that Tokyo's dense and efficient rail network is owned by multiple private companies running separate lines and stations which interconnect in many ad hoc ways.
One other thing, regarding housing demand and supply in Tokyo: the population of the metro region is shrinking. The problem for metro planners in Tokyo (and elsewhere in Japan) is that there's already more of everything than is needed.
Might Sapporo and other cities in Hokkaido be useful for providing lessons for American planners, given that they were built in the 19th century and thus have street grids that aren't too dissimilar to those of Texan cities?
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/06/sapporo-relevant-japanese-model-for.html
Japan sounds lovely. City dwelling is not for me - I get drained by the hustle and bustle - but making city dwelling closer to the Japanese model as you describe it would certainly, I think, make it better for those who enjoy it.
As a kid I thought trains and cars were both cool - I grew up in Jersey where the train is how you get to Philly and NYC and my dad rode it to work, so it was normal to me. But I LOVED cars.
Then I went to Japan and...trains are better. I still like both - which makes me only mostly urbanist - but the way Japan designed itself around trains was just so pleasant. The way everything happens at the convenience store, the way your little apartment feels cozy but you do your living in the town - it did feel better. Even the smallest towns are typically connected to the rail network and centered on the station - except maybe Shikoku, where they're centered on a bus stop. But they all have a nice little downtown plaza of restaurants that everyone can walk to, and some people drive or bike. It's just so well designed to live in and enjoy. You describe it and capture it so well.
And yea, I loved Japan. I am an American, and have settled and put roots down here, and there are a ton of things culturally and personally that make me prefer living here. But man I'm so happy I got to live there and I'd love to export so much of that Japanese mindset for how a town and city are built back this way.
Some people have the experience of a vacation where they get a small pricey hotel in the downtown area of a city and go out to eat every night. Imagine that, but not expensive, so it's all the time!
Another case of the heuristic "abundance feels like doing what a rich person does without being rich."
See also Matt Yglesias' commentaries on being an urban parent. You have all these parks and playgrounds, shows and activity spaces, well beyond what you can fit in your home and with way more connections to other local parents.
Great post! I've lived w/o a car in both WDC & SF, and it was great, just as you describe Japan. And my son & daughter have lived in Chicago & Sommerville, MA, without cars, enjoying the same warmth & convenience. Where I live now, an inner WDC burb, if could walk to shopping & restaurants, if I could safely cross a major thoroughfare. Sadly, I can't. We drive the two blocks! But there's space around the corner big enough for an ethnic grocery; so I have my fingers crossed.
Noah's point about the Large-Scale Retail Store Act is really interesting. I remember American negotiators trying to get that legislation relaxed in the 1990s, based on the (probably deluded) idea that it was a "non-tariff trade barrier" and that large chains would sell more imported US products.
Even if you're an admirer of the free market, it seems possible that the law has increased economic efficiency on net, because as long as it's in place they can't use zoning to exclude small stores. (In other words, the alternative to this regulation would be other, worse forms of regulation.) Someone should try to model that idea more rigorously.
Your description of a Japanese neighborhood sounds exactly like my experience of Greenwich Village, where I lived 1968- 1975. It also reflects the key points made in the classic study of urbanism: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs.
https://archive.org/search?query=%22Death+and+life+of+great+American+cities%22&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22
Enlightening article. I'd add that Manhattan, like Tokyo, has accessible, communal green space in the form of Central park, which is 840 acres (out of 15,000) in the middle of the island.