by hand

STREETS

Because Japanese notions of area trump the Western adulation of the street (Shelton, 1999) – “Streets seem to have little significance in the Japanese urban scheme of things to warrant the prestige that names confer” (Popham, 1985:48[1]) – they are not subject to the scrutiny that houses and plots face (Echanove, 2008:2). At the same time, these streets play the role of Western open spaces (plazas, public squares) but in a more ambiguously defined sense (both function and presence). Sixteenth Century changes in city subdivisions[2] led to living space that enveloped, rather than being enveloped by, the street – turning the street into the core of the community. The street became semi-public ambiguity – a medium in which individual living space and the metropolis could converge (Kurokawa, 1991:chpt6).

Alleyization of major thoroughfares (through gradual elimination of particular interior spaces and backstreets) in more recent times, have released potscapes and lush interiors into the city (Jinnai, 1995:130). The streets of Tokyo now belong not to ‘no one’[3] nor ‘everyone’, but ‘any one’ or more accurately, ‘someone’. Flexible, multivalent and proactive use of alleys, thoroughfares, walkways and roads for everyday life[4] (Jinnai, 1995:124; Kurokawa, 1991:chpt6) is possible and permissible (a human focused form of void metabolism where) the ‘organic, unrestricted’ (Echanove, 2008:2) results of which prompt us to ask “What is the line between ornament and sustenance, today’s structures and centuries of agriculture?” (Braiterman, 2010)…… the realization of the city where people live in symbiosis with technology, animals, birds and insects, and potted plants and bonsai and manmade forests, too, does not seem so far in the future after all (Kurokawa, 1991:chpt10).

[1] In Shelton (1999:66).

[2] Hideyoshi in the Sixteenth Century changed the subdivisions of the then-capital (Heian) Kyoto cutting square blocks (machi) diagonally creating two new units (cho) which were together called machi – a seemingly insignificant change which turned out to have pervasive impact (Kurokawa, 1991:chpt6).

[3] See e.g. Perec (1974)

[4] Ref: ‘People’s Park’ Blueprint for a Communal Environment (see discussion in Bookchin, 1974:130) – “dismantling of backyards and sideyard fences to open land as interior parks and gardens.”