10/06/2026
Tokyo Urbanism: Building the Intimate Megacity
🏢🌐 A hybrid u:japan lecture by Joe McReynolds (Keio University, Tokyo) 🌐🏢
📅 11.06.2026 (Thursday)
🕛 18:00 – 19:30 CET
💬 English language
📍Department of East Asian Studies, Japanese Studies (2.4), Seminarraum 1
🌐 and online over ZOOM (link on our website)
Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Com¬pared to Western metropolises like New York or Berlin, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo’s inner workings. For cities around the globe mired in crisis and seeking new models for the future, Tokyo’s success at balancing growth and local community poses a challenge: if we learn why Tokyo succeeds, can we use that knowledge to improve our cities at home?
Joe McReynolds, the co-author of Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, answers this question in the affirmative by delving into Tokyo’s most distinctive urban spaces, from iconic neon nightlife to tranquil neighborhood backstreets. Tokyo at its best offers a new vision for a human-scale urban ecosystem, where ordinary residents shape their own envi¬ronment in ways large and small, and communities take on a life of their own beyond government master planning and corporate profit-seeking. As a Tokyoite himself, he uncovers how key features of Tokyo’s cityscape such as intimate yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings and dense low-rise neighborhoods together enable this ‘emergent’ urban¬ism, allowing the city to organize itself from the bottom up.
Above all, this talk will give a clear account of the web of public policies that makes Tokyo's emergent urbanism possible, from transit to zoning to housing. By demystifying the social and spatial conditions that power Tokyo, we can extract practical, trans-cultural lessons for the rest of the world. We can bring Tokyo-style intimacy, adaptability, and spontaneity to our cities at home -- as long as we learn to ask the right questions about how our cities are built and governed.
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