by hand

Additive, centrifugal, the Japanese city starts with individual parts and expands. Proliferates. Undefined. Unclear centers. Looser and more ambiguous than in European countries, freedom is valued over regularity of form of clarity of outline. Convolutions in the architecture due to lack of restrictions on building texture and materials + projecting signboards, advertising, banners, electric poles and wires + bedding and washing on every balcony railing add to the lack of unity. (Ashihara, 1989: 54-7, 68-95 The Arithmetic of Form)

In a city form rooted in and intensified from (1) a soil dismembered (Bruno Taut, 1937:p219[1]) by multiple generations of land division, addition and transfer into a tapestry of scattered, unconnected plots under the same ownership (Shelton, 1999: p44-47) , (2) assemblages of disparate and independent administrative blocks whose governance differed little from that of rural villages[3] (Smith, 1978:50, 67) and (3) the cyclical metabolism of inheritance tax and regulation fueled subdivision (Tsukamoto, 2010; Nagasaka, in Maki, 2000a:37), with a modern history of city administrative structures which identify with the state at the top but are left to their own devices at the bottom[4] ordinary citizens[5],[6] of the present make their neighborhoods greener with their micro-gardens (Braiterman, 2010 dead); frugal[7] constructions (Brandenburg, 2005: 14) which are beautiful in content if not always form[8]. A collective memory of a patchwork of hidden patterns of ownership (Shelton, 1999:44), developed rapidly and haphazardly (Smith, 1978:69, also Kerkhof, 2000) under high economic and demographic pressures, absent legal mechanisms, and resistance of local community to central planning (Srivastava and Echanove, 2008) now exists as ‘egg and shell’ (urban village) neighbourhoods (high-rise on the perimeter, low rise on the interior) with ‘virtually no open space’ (Echanove, 2007; Jonas, 2007:21; Tsukamoto, 2010) where gardeners, bird watchers, beekeepers, and neighborhood volunteers improve urban life through their everyday knowledge and passion (Braiterman, 2010 deadspace).

[1] in Shelton, 1999:p45

[2] Political cities in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) were governed not as homogeneous entities but at the level of the chō (neighbourhood), with autonomy a delegated duty rather than a right (Smith, 1978:50).

[3] Conjuntive not connective.

[4] From the Meiji Era (1868-1912) through to 1930, the neighbourhood level (closely regulated in the Edo period) was left unregulated (Smith, 1978:53).

[5] Some of the most humanistic notions of urbanism come from amateurs who retain contact with (or live) the authentic experiences of people and the mundane agonies of metropolitan life (Bookchin, 1974:101).

[6] Ordinary citizen gardeners → amateur gardening = lovers of gardening (Stiegler, 2010:18; also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur).

[7] Artless and natural, like sukiya-style architecture (Kurokawa, 1991:chpt4)

[8] Ashihara (1989:133) discussing the Tokyo townscape.