Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Retrospective: Sites & Services
Alain Bertaud revisits a Mumbai development project he helped design in 1983. The neighborhood is thriving.
Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Category World
Dataviz links: Over time, across space
Three cool sites for data and visualizations
Mumbai upzoning
A 2017 increase in allowed floor area ratio in Mumbai had a tremendous impact on affordability by accidentally improving the economics of smaller apartments.
Responsive Cities in the arena: Brazil floods
How do urbanists respond to a disaster? Emails from Brazil's Rodrigo Rocha show innovation and personal resilience in the face of crisis.
Should governments nudge land assembly?
For a reading group, I recently read two papers about the costs and (in)efficiencies around land assembly. One advocated nudging small landowners into land assembly; the other is an implicit caution against doing so. Graduated Density Zoning Although he’s mostly known for parking research and policy, Donald Shoup responded to the ugliness of eminent domain in Kelo v. City of New London, with a 2008 paper suggesting “graduated density zoning” as a milder alternative. Graduated density zoning would allow greater densities or higher height limits for larger parcels – so that holdouts would face greater risk. Samurai to Skyscrapers Junichi Yamasaki, Kentaro Nakajima, and Kensuke Teshima’s paper, From Samurai to Skyscrapers: How Transaction Costs Shape Tokyo, is a fascinating and technical account of how sweeping changes put the relative prices of different-sized lots on a roller-coaster from the 19th century to the present. First, large estates were mandated as a way for the shogun to keep nobles under his close control. Then, with the Meiji Restoration, the nobles were released to sell their land, swamping the market and depressing prices. The value of land in former estate areas stayed low into the 1950s. But with the advent of skyscrapers – which need large base areas – the old estate areas first matched and then exceeded neighboring small-lot areas in central Tokyo. A meta-lesson from this reversal is that “efficiency” is a time-bound concept. One can imagine a 1931 urban planner imposing a tight street grid and forcing lot subdivision to unlock value on the depressed side of the tracks. That didn’t happen; instead, the large lots were a land bank that allowed a skyscraper boom right near the heart of a very old city, helping propel the Japanese economy beyond middle-income status. We should take a long, uncertain view of […]
Introducing Szymon Pifczyk
Market Urbanism is proud to welcome Szymon Pifczyk as a new writer. Here's a short interview we conducted over email.
Is Tokyo comparable to U.S. cities?
In his new book Arbitrary Lines, Nolan Gray points out that Tokyo is more affordable than many U.S. cities because its zoning policies are less restrictive. One common counterargument is that because Tokyo is a population-losing city in a population-losing city, it simply lacks the demand to have high housing prices, and is thus more comparable to the low-cost Rust Belt than to high-cost cities like New York. But a short look at my World Almanac suggests otherwise. On page 730, it lists the world’s largest urban areas. It shows that between 2000 and 2021 , Tokyo actually grew by 8.4 percent. By contrast, metropolitan New York-Newark grew by 5.7 percent, and Los Angeles by 5.6 percent. In other words, Tokyo’s population actually grew more rapidly than high-cost U.S. cities.
Unpacking Emergent Tokyo with author Jorge Almazán
As foreigners, we are mesmerized by zakkyo buildings or yokocho, but within Japan, scholars, and authorities often ignore and neglect them as urban subproducts. In spite of their conspicuous presence and popularity, the official discourse still considers most of Emergent Tokyo as unsightly, dangerous, or underdeveloped. The book offers the Japanese readership a fresh view of their own everyday life environment as a valuable social, spatial, and even aesthetic legacy from which they could envision alternative futures.
Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan
American YIMBYs point to Tokyo as proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability. But a great deal of that knowledge can be traced back to a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog post. As the YIMBY movement matures, it's time to go books deep into the fascinating details of Japan's land use institutions.
Reading Hayek in Holland
Hayek says that planning is the road to serfdom. Holland may be the most thoroughly planned country on earth - and it's delightful. How does a market urbanist respond to excellent planning?
