Is Tokyo ugly?

By circumstance, I have found myself in Tokyo for a two month period. What surprised me most about Tokyo is that the city is generally built upon a network of small streets, laneways and footways. Most of the streets are wide enough only to allow cars to travel in one direction, which drive at speeds low enough to avoid power poles, cyclists and pedestrians, abundant on every street.

Tokyo is also a dense city, and small restaurants and shops of every description can be found along some of Tokyo's back streets. Apartment building are scattered throughout the urban framework. The single-use districts so common in post-war districts of Australian (and American) cities are much less prevalent in Tokyo.

All of this makes Tokyo a fun, liveable city, due to its walkable streets and activity on every corner, and it can certainly be compared to some of the great cities in the post-war world such as London and Paris.

Tokyo does, however, have an unfortunate reputation: it is known as an ugly city. See, for example, this forum. To understand why, it helps to understand its background. Today's agglomeration of over 35 million people (including 13 million in Tokyo prefecture) begun from a base of close to 1.4 million people in 1889, and grew rapidly. By 1935, the population had grown to 6.36 million, comparable to the populations of London and New York. The population growth is even more amazing considering the significant damage done to the city in the 1923 (the Great Kanto earthquake) and 1945 (American bombing of the city).

Development controls over the city were basic (compared to planning controls implemented in Australia and America) and comprise an urban growth boundary and plot ratio limits. The government didn't otherwise interfere in how the city was to be rebuilt, after all one of the key priorities was to rebuild the city. The structure of the city was largely unchanged, with the main changes being the construction of a few main roads. The buildings constructed largely did not conform to any particular architectural style, and they all differed in height, width, setback, materials, colours, etc. The lack of architectural uniformity (such as that found in parts of London and Paris) is perhaps one of the reasons why Tokyo is known as an 'ugly' city.

There is more to the story that just architecture. In the late 1950s, Tokyo began construction of an elevated expressway system, being constructed mainly over existing highways and waterways, and here it is useful using London as an example. Charing Cross was once the location from where all distances in England were measured. This symbolic location was beautified over the 20th Century by the erection of a statue, and later the development of the adjoining Trafalgar Square, reflecting the importance of the Cross. In Tokyo, Nihombashi (literally 'Japan bridge') performed the same role as the location where all distances in Japan were measured; the bridge was improved in 1911. Visitors to Nihombashi today are greeted by an expressway just meters above the bridge (in fact the light poles in the centre of the bridge go up in between the expressway). There have been talks about undergrounding this section of expressway for hundreds of billions of yen.

I am currently staying in Hasunuma, a district in Itabashi City in Tokyo's northwest. Hasunuma is fortunate in some respect: One subway stop to the south and visitors are greeted by one of Tokyo's tall, shadow-casting two-storey expressways; two stops to the north and the subway turns into an elevated railway, carving its way through rows and rows of flats, often just metres from the buildings. Hasunuma has largely retained its pre-war street network. Is it beautiful? It maintains the mis-match of architectural styles like elsewhere in Tokyo, with limited open space outside of sporting grounds. It would be a stretch to argue that Hasunuma is beautiful. But it certainly is liveable, and no doubt the residents of Hasunuma appreciate that.