modern japanese waterfront developments - global vs. local

IV Ajman Urban Planning Conference, 29th-31st March 2010, Ajman, United Arab Emirates

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Modern Japanese Waterfront Developments - Global vs. Local

Raffaele Pernice

Assistant Professor, Department of Architectural Engineering, Ajman University of Science and Technology - UAE

Abstract

This study outlines the trend of waterfront (re-)development in Japan during the recent decades by

presenting some significant urban and architectural projects located in large cities, such as Tokyo,

Osaka, and Kobe, and other local and regional centers. These projects, analysed and proposed as

exemplary case studies, present a concise overview that is representative of the Japanese approach

to the design of waterfront environments. This approach ranges from mega-scale urban projects

with high international ambitions, typical of the sustained economic growth since the early 1980s,

to a more limited scale that aimed to create friendlier and community-oriented environments. Keywords: marine cities, Metabolism, waterfront, Japan, Tokyo Bay

Origin of Mega-projects in post-war Japan

As a nation devoted to international trade and industrial development, Japan has historically

fostered the growth of an impressive, efficient and modern network of port-cities as fundamental

centers for production and export. Furthermore the rapidity of urban development during the post-

war years has prompted the promotion of very innovative and radical concept in urban design and

architecture for these cities, with urban schemes and projects of huge scale that are still relevant

today. In Japan the spread of interest in highly innovative and advanced urban models for

waterfront redevelopment dates back to the late 1950s, during which several schemes of waterfront

development and artificial marine environments were developed. The site for most of those schemes

was in the shallow waters of Tokyo Bay, the economic, political and cultural center of Japan, which

became a privileged area for many utopian urban projects.1

A combination of factors

simultaneously present at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s (economic growth, urban expansion,

technological innovation, the dawn of a consumerist society) set the “cultural milieu”, in Japan and

other industrialized countries, which led to a growing interest and progressive acceptance for the

theme of marine cities as an alternative urban environment. This new spirit fostered and inspired

bold and ambitious architectural proposals and urban plans over the succeeding years. In particular,

many coastal Japanese cities experienced a serious shortage of suitable areas for new construction

in their central districts as well as the need to renew or improve their existing infrastructure.

The years of rapid economic growth from 1955 to 1973 were characterized by a progressive

increase in the capital accumulation derived from unprecedented expanding exports, and to keep

pace with this economic prosperity, the coastal cities of Japan required more room both for

industrial and residential use. New networks for energy supply and mass transportation were


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designed and built to support the economic expansion at the expense of residential and functional

public areas in the city centers. This in turn contributed to further urban sprawl and pollution.

The rapid growth of, and demand for container-vessels for sea-borne transportation generated a

growing awareness of the strategic importance of waterfront developments for large metropolitan

areas. This fostered the improvement of obsolete port infrastructures and the construction of new

harbour facilities to host larger cargo ships. Sea reclamation works on a massive scale were carried

out to create artificially new sites for larger industrial areas, petrochemical complexes and energy

plants as close as possible to trade and shipping routes.2 As an important and long lasting

consequence of the economic miracle of the 1960s, large areas of Japanese coastline near big cities

witnessed a progressive process of radical topographic transformation. Many port cities, such as

Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe, were abruptly altered and the natural shape of their urban

waterfronts and shorelines were totally changed especially after 1960 due to these vast programs of

landfill activity which lasted for more than two decades. The massive scale of waterfront

transformation and extension, along with the spread of the artificial land into the sea and the

development of new warehouse and factory complexes supported by a system of new railways

networks boosted a rapid growth of port areas throughout the country. These new ports were

equipped with larger docks, wharfs, and deeper berths to accommodate the growing freight traffic.

The dynamism and rapidity of the development of these ports, coupled with the necessity to create

more land for housing and public services to support them cast a heavy burden on local

governments. These municipal areas strove to control the severe urban congestion caused by rapid

immigration from the rural areas. They were also forced to develop fast and effective measures to

balance the need to sustain economic growth of its production facilities and the need to house

people on less and less space within the city.3

Megastructures and Marine Cities in the early 1960s

In April 1958, the Japan Housing Corporation (JHC) proposed an extreme solution to the land

shortage in the areas of Tokyo Metropolis. Their plan was to fill and polder the entire east side of

Tokyo Bay from the Tsukiji District to the Boso peninsula, thereby adding a total of 42,500 Km2 of

new land. Called the “Kuro Kano Proposal”, after the JHC president who presented the plan, it was

conceived as the ultimate solution for Tokyo’s exceptional urban growth. Although it was

technologically and financially feasible, the length of time that it would take to complete the

reclamation works became a major deterrent for such an epic undertaking. The reaction of many

architects and planners was especially harsh; the plan was severely criticized because of the risk of

total destruction of the natural environment of the harbour and the fact that it could offered little in

alleviating congestion and preventing further urban sprawl on the new reclaimed lands. Indeed it

was in this context that new radical proposals for marine cites started to draw attention to new urban

prototypes built on artificial land. 4 The firsts to propose an offshore artificial land as a total new

marine urban habitat were the architects Masato Otaka and Kiyonori Kikutake. Both men belonged

to the avant-garde Metabolist architectural movement, which promoted its manifesto at the Tokyo

World Design Conference in 1960. Otaka’s “Neo-Tokyo Plan - City on the Sea”, and Kikutake’s

“Marine City” appeared in late 1958 and were in many ways counterproposals to the Kano Plan,

which was published a few months earlier. Their schemes represented the beginning of a


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completely new approach in Japanese urban design and architecture. They envisioned the extensive

use of high density and super-rise residential buildings on reclaimed land as an alternative to the

traditional low-rise suburban developments built outside the fringes of metropolitan centers. The

two young architects interpreted housing, public services, industrial facilities and urban

infrastructure as comprehensive and integrated structures and focused especially on the design of

multi-dwelling housing prototypes and other mixed used residential models. These two plans

became important precedents for further reflection and investigation about the nature of new urban

settlements and modern housing design in the following years, as they attempted to modernize the

characters of urbanized landscape, which at the time was largely composed of a fragmented and

chaotic urban fabric of traditional low roofs, low density wooden dwellings, with poor public

services, few private spaces, and scanty green areas.

Otaka’s scheme for Tokyo’s development on the sea was an upgraded version of the traditional

linear city concept, which itself owed much to Miliutin’s plan for Stalingrad in the 1920s. Otaka

envisioned two parallel broad strips of functionally differentiated areas built over the water by

means of reclaimed land and artificial decks, and running offshore along the entire edge of Tokyo

Bay. The elemental zoning of the horse hoof-shaped master plan was an exemplary application of

modernist approach coded in the Athens Charter, with an evident emphasis upon the development

of an extensive traffic network of expressways and on the design of high density housing complexes.

These were designed as clusters of tall slabs built directly over the sea on strips of man made land,

which in turn supported a system of artificial platforms as “urban podiums”, a concept Otaka later

will develop and refine in other urban projects.5 Even bolder was Kikutake’s “Marine City Project”

(first published in 1958 as “Marine City” and then revised in 1960 as “Sea City Unabara”, which

later became a key project of the Metabolist Movement). This project represented a model of a

floating industrial city, labelled as an “unit-space of production”, which proposes a comprehensive

alternative both to the modernist urban design approach and to the traditional residential-industrial

complexes (kombinatos) developed in Japan mostly on waterfront landfills by engineers and official

planners. Kikutake designed his city as a model of an integrated system of multi-functional urban

elements, and strove to match the aesthetic quality of the architectural structures with the

functionality of the overall plan, searching for a new urban environment in the sea that was apart

from the congested and polluted cities of the land.6 The city showed an organic form shaped as two

concentric rings, the inner for residential use and the outer for industrial purposes, both constructed

as floating reinforced concrete and steel structures anchored but not fixed to the sea bottom. The

whole urban lay-out resembled a huge artificial movable floating atoll, filled with high density

buildings and vast amount of free land for leisure and natural view. Different versions of marine

cities were developed and further refined by Kikutake in the next years, who published the

outcomes of his research and the new models for an “Ocean City” between 1962-63 and then in

1968. As a founder and one of the main proponents of the Metabolist Group, Kikutake presented the

new design and architectural principles of the Japanese avant-garde in his projects to a worldwide

audience. His models of marine cities and floating structures, which represented an important part

of the new urban ideas proposed by Metabolism and enunciated in the original manifesto, had a

deep and long lasting impact over other designers and architects in Japan and abroad, and his ideas


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fostered the search for the innovative forms of the future city and architecture, beyond the formal

influence of the historical heritage and the traditional urban landscape.

It was in 1961 that the most famous model of Japanese marine city, conceived as a collection of

integrated megastructures, was unveiled and almost at once became an icon of the total urban

design for a marine urban habitat: Kenzo Tange’s “Tokyo Plan 1960”, which indeed echoed many

of the features already present in the Metabolist approach, even though the models and drawings

presented showed many more details. Aimed to revolutionise the formal image of the contemporary

city according to a sense of monumentality mixed with a new symbolic value, Tange’s plan was

based on a structuralist vision of the urban design approach, which gave prominence to the

development of an extensive and highly organized circulation network integrated with a system of

mega-infrastructure.7 In particular Tange recognized the importance of driving the future growth of

Tokyo into the sea, separating the old center on the land from the new area of expansion on the sea,

to avoid further congestion of the central core. It seems plausible that his general idea that Tokyo

might develop into the sea was somewhat influenced by a condition of some combined factors. First,

there was an ongoing planning policy of Tokyo government for land reclamation aimed to build

new industrial areas along the coasts. Second, the idea was generally suggested by many similar

proposals by architects (as the above mentioned Metabolists) and private corporations. Third, it was

evident that the constant risk of speculation and the constraints for the implementation of large

urban projects could only be overcome by constructing over artificial soil because the land price

was far cheaper and the legal restrictions which prevented comprehensive design in the mainland

(such as the complications due to the need to deal with many individual landlords and difficulties in

property expropriation) were virtually nonexistent. In terms of building technology, Tange proposed

a scheme which adopted land reclamation, suspended bridges and artificial platforms set on pilotis

to create city of a multiple levels, which mixed suggestions from Le Corbusier to Kikutake’s

projects to adapt the new urban structure to the natural environment of the sea. The result was a city

which stressed the importance of the circulation system and the clear separation of functional

districts.

Fig 1. Kiyonori Kikutake’s

“Ocean City”, 1961.

Source: Kindai Kenchiku, Vol.14,

No.5, May 1960.

Fig 2. Kisho Kurokawa’s

“Kasumigaura Floating City”, 1961.

Source:Kisho Kurokawa,

Metabolism in Architecture, 1976.

Fig 3. Kenzo Tange’s “Plan for Tokyo”, 1961.

Source: Udo Kultermann, Kenzo Tange, 1989


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Another marine city which shared Kenzo Tange’s concept of an urban structure as vertical zoning

and architecture of motion, with an emphasis over the vehicular movement system laid on the top of

the urban unit designed as a container frame of smaller plug-in dwelling elements, was the

“Kasumigaura Floating City” designed by Kisho Kurokawa in 1961. This project, designed

according to the fundamental concepts of progressive growth and change put forward by Metabolist

thinking, conceived the basic elemental unit of the city as a sort of self-contained urban district

characterized by vertical zoning. Multiple numbers of elevators were proposed to assured the

communication between different levels. It was shaped as a floating buoy which can connect to

other urban units to form groups of clusters as a larger and ever growing urban sector. The organic

and unpredictable development of this city thanks to the connection of different floating structures

was intended as proof of its flexibility and effectiveness of the open system design approach;

Metabolism then shared such a similarity with Structuralism in architectural design and progressed

without hesitation into the creation of a totally artificial urban environment over the water,

searching for a way of coexistence between natural habitat and the modern infrastructures for the

benefit of the population of a modern city, and in response to the needs of modern society in the

Atomic Age. Indeed this project well represented most of the attitude manifested by others

architects towards the design of new cities on the water throughout the 1960s. An approach which

saw these marine cities as functional, compact and visually complex urban structure designed

through the combination of multiple impressive megastructures, easily changeable and capable of

instant growth due to their nature as an assemblage of modular and standard components, and aimed

to support just the most basic function of the inhabitants in terms of housing, leisure, movement and

work.8

New Waterfront Development and Projects from late 1960s to 1986

Apart from the idea of the marine city as technologically advanced and futuristic-oriented living

environments designed by architects, the Japanese government also sponsored and addressed

researches for similar marine and new waterfront settlements, accomplishing noteworthy results

especially in the planning of new urban sectors built by means of the less sophisticated but safer

technique of land reclamation. Furthermore land reclamation also produced an important increase

of the wealth of the national state and local municipalities because the process created additional

land which virtually was public property, and as such became an additional source of further

capitals investments. After the end of Second World War and with the recovery of the economic

situation starting from the middle of the 1950s, new projects to expand and modernize ports and

harbours and increase the amount of land for industrial and shipping use were widely promoted all

around Japan. 9 This followed a tradition that was deeply rooted in the urban history of many port

cities (such as Edo-Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka), which considered coastal land filling as an optimal

tool for urban expansion. 10 In the context of the progressive post-war economic growth, plans to

develop new and important logistic facilities for the export of commercial goods became a top

priority for many port cities, which witnessed a steady increase of the volume of shipping trade

transported by larger and larger container ships

There was also a necessity to increase the protection of the waterfront trade, industrial zones and

urban coastlines from natural disasters, especially typhoon, earthquakes and tsunamis, which proved


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to be a major threat to vulnerable and unprotected port cites. An example was Nagoya in Ise Bay,

which was heavily damaged by a strong and destructive typhoon in 1959. New coastal engineering

construction works such as offshore breakwaters structures and artificial harbours were

implemented in many waterfront areas by local municipalities, and finally a comprehensive policy

for a coordinated redevelopment and planning of the ports was drawn up by central government

under the “The First Five-Year Port Development Plan” (1961-65).11 Under the auspices of this

plan, the city of Kobe set forerunner programs to enhance her port as a fundamental commercial

gateway to West Japan at a domestic and international level. The urban development of Kobe

during the previous 100 years well represented the astonishing pace of growth experienced by many

others Japanese port cities. With a population of 30.000 people in 1868, it reached more than 1,5

million by the late 1950s, and most of the urban expansion was driven by industry and shipping

trade, as Kobe was the first Japanese port for trade quantity. The fast evolution of trade transport

means and the progressive containerization of the exports led to set plans to build new container

piers and port terminals suitable for larger ships.

Due to the critical topographic site of Kobe, which was closed on its backwards by the chain of

Rokko Mountains, large scale infill projects were carried on along the coastline to locate new

factories, port facilities and garbage collection plans. Finally in 1966 the plan to build a mixed

function city on an artificial offshore island was set up. The land reclamation necessary to complete

the construction of the first Japanese marine new town “Port Island” took almost twenty years, and

it was the outcome of a comprehensive plan which involved engineers, experts, governmental and

private enterprises and architects. In the long run all their combined efforts accomplished the

creation of an urban system of marine new towns in the sea and new industrial districts and bed

towns on the land, with the latter ones set on most of the sites used to provide soil for the land fill

along the coast. What it was claimed as a success (the execution of the first Port Island) gave way to

further plans to build from 1972 another marine new town, “Rokko Island”, and then to expand

“Port Island” into a second stage while simultaneously developing a new waterfront area in the old

central district of the city (Harborland).12

Fig 4. Kobe: Plan of the Rokko and Port Island.

Source: Kenji Hotta (edited by) and others: Engineered

Coasts, 2002.

Fig 5. Kobe: Harbor-land. Photograph: the author.


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These offshore artificial islands, conceived as small self contained marine cities, resulted into a

profound alteration of the existing harbour landscape of Kobe, and the city’s functional lay-out as

well. The exisitng city had a concentration of specialized infrastructural complexes within her

boundaries that aimed to satisfy the requirements of industrial production. The new urban structure

derived by the presence of separated multi-functional parts that were more than mere utilitarian

territorial appendixes, was developed according to the dynamic of movements of goods, ships and

peoples. It was situated apart from the planning of conventional old port cities, whose waterfront

areas drawn almost all the harbour functions and infrastructures, and are virtually separated from

the residential and commercial areas of the city.

The urban lay-out of both the Port Island and Rokko Island resembles and recalls, with their

sense of enclosed community surrounded by an outer layer of empty open space and a clear

boundary between the two areas, the scheme and the urban morphology of the Howard’s “Garden

City” concept (in Japan revisited as “Den-en toshi” in early 20th century). Port Island, for instance,

has a simple zoning with the central core of the island for residential and urban services and is

characterized by rational architectural volumes which are separated by the outer harbour and piers

areas by a buffer zone delimitated by the monorail network, so that the final townscape is that of

“an island inside an island”; or an even smaller and milder version of the Island of Manhattan. On

Rokko Island the monorail (which is also the main transport system that connects with the city on

the mainland) does not enclose the urban core but flows along its main urban axis area, an area

filled with residential towers, hotels, social facilities, squares and other open spaces. Creating an

effective blend of different functions and uses, much room was left either for green areas or for

future expansion and development of new architectures and urban facilities.

Urban Mega-projects on the Waterfronts in the 1980s and early 1990s: Tokyo, Osaka and

Yokohama

In the early 1980s a progressive shift in economic factors after the second oil shock in 1979-1980

set the foundation for a new fast period of economic growth in Japan, which eventually led to the so

called economic “Bubble”. A new awareness of the importance of modern and more efficient public

facilities and infrastructures for industrial cities, aimed to strengthen their competitiveness into a

more globalized and interconnected world system of cities, resulted into an impressive numbers of

new mega-scale urban projects along the waterfronts. Indeed these areas were seen as privileged

spaces for the improvement of the city functions at an international level.13

In particular in the case

of Tokyo Bay, the port district became the source of a major attention for local government and

private enterprises, whose ambition envisioned new projects that would link economic expansion to

the urban restructuring of the vast metropolitan region of the capital.

In 1986 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government proposed the creation of a “multi-polar metropolis

plan” to control the further spread of the city central business district, and in doing so to limit its

urban congestion and the excessive density of population. The main features of the proposed

scheme, known as the “Amano Proposal” (after the name of the governor of the city council then),

was the development of a decentralized system of urban subcenters, whose main core was to be set

in the waterfront area of Tsukiji and Daiba reclaimed lands and was named “Tokyo Teleport Town”.

According to the bureaucrats’ vision who supported the proposal, this new urban core would


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enhance Tokyo’s potentials as an attractive and modern international financial center. 14 Following a

pragmatic and economics oriented approach to planning, the proposal designated a new urban

center to be built by extensive works of landfill which destined most of Tokyo Bay especially for

commercial and services development, virtually transforming that area into a huge showroom of the

new economic prosperity of Japan. Against this evident and questionable market-led urban policy,

which embodied the interests of powerful Japanese private companies, developers and local

politicians, other projects were proposed by other designers and planners, all of them rejecting the

speculative character of such scheme (which emphasized a cityscape made of office towers,

functional spaces and service facilities) in favour of more investments in housing complexes, with

attention to recreational green areas and public spaces.

Among the several alternative projects there was Kenzo Tange’s project for a “Tokyo Bay City

Plan”, which proposed the creation of a system of large mixed use artificial islands, following his

comprehensive and socially oriented approach to planning and suggesting an open-ended and linear

pattern of urban growth. Basically the urban lay-out of the project was a softer and up-to-date

version of the monumental and strict hierarchical structuralist order of spaces and movement

networks already put forward in his first “Tokyo Plan” (1961), but with minor visual impact and

less concern for mass housing issues. Kisho Kurokawa’s “Neo Tokyo Plan 2025”, with a purely

poetic but sterile vision of architecture, translated on a larger scale many of his earlier metabolist

urban architectures, arranged as clusters of floating structures around and on a doughnut-shaped

reclamation area in the center of Tokyo Bay. Other projects showed a growing concern for

environmental issues such as the “Oshino Proposal”, which considered the idea of turning Tokyo

Bay into a natural preserved “harbour park”, whereas others expressed the interest of independent

corporations and private research bodies for the artificial islands as “good business” for the

immediate future and proposed prototypes of marine structures based on sophisticated technological

researches. 15

In spite of the objective (good) reasons in support of these alternative projects, the construction

of the new Tokyo waterfront subcenter was carried out in the following years (and similar schemes

Fig 6-7. Kenzo Tange’s “Plan for Tokyo”, 1986. Source: the Japan Architect, Vol.62, 12/1987, No. 368.


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were also proposed in Fukuoka’s “Island City” and the new Nagoya port area). The project resulted

in what many critics claimed in dismay as an anachronistic and unfitted late-modernist urban layout

and ill-fitted with groups of large neo-rationalist architectures scattered all around the vast empty

spaces of reclaimed areas and connected by boulevard-like long paths, lacking any formal relation

with the traditional urban Tokyo streetscape and its mixed land use pattern.16 Another problem here

and also as in other cases of marine new towns, were the transportation connection and functional

activities with the mainland and other main urban districts of the which resulted in higher costs for

residents and workers.17

Indeed the revenue from services such as transportation, housing and retail

was the main reason that propelled the massive investments of capitals into large scale

redevelopment projects along the waterfronts and other land reclamation projects.

The same kind of large scale waterfront development can be seen in the projects for Osaka Bay’s

“Techno-Port Osaka”, and Yokohama’s new urban front of “Minato Mirai 21”, as examples of

ambitious urban programs characterized by impressive architectures, innovative technologies,

radical land reclamation works and the provision of large infrastructures aimed to foster business

activities, attract foreign capitals and investments, and encourage leisure and touristic movements,

promoted in the context of the general economic euphoria of the 1980s.

In Osaka the new waterfront was designed on the reclaimed lands (such as also the new Kansai

international airport designed by Renzo Piano). The new district of Nanko Island, which is directly

connected to the central urban area by new subway lines, hosts several office buildings, the new

international trade centers of the city (the Asia Pacific Center and the World International Center)

and other marketplaces, and is especially an area for pleasant shopping with many entertainment

and cultural facilities, such as museums, an aquarium and a park for tourists.

In Yokohama the plan for “Minato Mirai 21” (Port of the Future) was intended as another

example of a large–scale urban renewal development of the old waterfront of the city. It required

massive landfill, and the final project was remarkably similar in the functional and formal image to

others in Tokyo and Osaka, with a master plan based on a rigid street grid system which follows a

clear urban zoning. The three main city axes articulate the whole composition and connected the

focal points of the area: the link between the 2 main railway stations and the seaside, and the main

shopping mall axis which intersect them. Large–scale buildings were inserted in the open spaces

Fig 8. Osaka‘s new waterfront area in “Nanko Island”. Source: www.Japan-guide.com


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and underground public services created a powerful image of technological megastructures which

somehow recalled the spirit of the projects of Metabolism. The first master plan, further refined in

the following years, was designed in 1981 by Masato Otaka, one of the former proponent of the

group. This project also signalled a new urban renewal policy of the Japanese government, which

called for an active participation of the private sector, so that while the city authority promoted and

organized the development of the whole area by providing the fundamental infrastructures and the

general master plan, private developers and corporations completed their projects independently.

Floating Marine Architectures during the 1990s and the Burst of the “Bubble”

Since the middle of the 1980s many public and private companies considered that the

construction of artificial islands and marine cities could eventually lead to an increase in domestic

demand and reduce the national trade imbalance.18 Many new projects were designed to develop

leisure facilities and resort complexes on offshore artificial islands of limited size, and studies on

the technical and financial feasibility of such projects, and on their potential economic outcomes,

were carried out, consequently fostering broader researches in the fields of coastal ocean space

utilization and marine engineering. New offshore floating platforms, able to resist the critical

environmental conditions in the sea and other natural disasters, and that could relieve the

chronically shortage of buildable land of Japan as well, were investigated to be designated for

particular use, such as a floating airport, a floating wharf and storage facilities. In 1995 the

Technological Research Association of Mega-float (TRAM) was set up in order to develop very

large floating structures (VLFS or Mega-float), a sort of floating mat for multiple uses conceived as

an efficient alternative to the extremely costly, time consuming, and environmentally destructive

technique of land reclamation. Designed to provide cheaply but efficient waterfront facilities for

port-cites, these structures demonstrated the advantages of a preliminary design process, other than

their resistance to earthquakes and flexibility in the selection of sites for their use. This in turn

fostered deeper studies in advanced construction techniques and the design of new offshore floating

platforms suitable to be used as floating terminal containers, rescue bases, floating hotels and

offshore floating airports, the first of which was successfully tested in Tokyo Bay in 1999.19

Fig 10. Tokyo: riverfront in Shinagawa District.

Photograph: the author.

Fig 9. Yokohama: Pacifico Yokohama in MM21 (City for

the XXI Century). Photograph: the author.


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After the burst of the economic bubble during the 1990s many mega-projects were stopped.

During the “lost decade” of Japan, a new awareness spread from the local community aimed to

valorise and respect the historical heritage of the sites, which before were exploited in the name of

economic growth, like in the case of the old natural and artificial waterways of Tokyo which were

turned into expressways for the 1964 Olympic Games. This new approach which is currently under

way and is clearly evident in some relevant redevelopment projects in Tokyo (along the old canals

of Sumida and Shinagawa-ward), Osaka (the canal along Dotombori District) and elsewhere in

Japan, is the signal of the new search for genuine and collective local identity which will probably

reshape and improve the urban image of Japanese cites for the years to come.

Conclusions

The pioneering role of the early marine cities and waterfront redevelopment projects developed

during the years of rapid economic growth as a synthesis of architecture and urbanism (such as

Kenzo Tange, the Metabolists), have proved to be long-lasting and mirrored the rooted

experimental approach that was present in Japan during the last four decades in the resolution of

some basics problems caused by the continuous urban growth: land shortage for industrial and

residential use, coastal works for the protection from natural disasters and improvements to port

facilities. These were basically derived from studies into industrialized prefabrication and mass

production of modern housing and infrastructures, which eventually led towards innovative and

bold urban prototype and city forms, often, as seen for instance in the case of the Metabolists,

conceived as a reaction to the contradictions and limits of the planning practice and urban policy led

by the Japanese government, which implemented a program of brutal land reclamation along the

Japanese coasts since the late 1950s. It is interesting to note that the projects developed along the

coastal areas in the early 1960s and during the late 1980s-early1990s were all conceived in a period

of strong economic expansion, and they aimed to promote a form of decentralization of some of the

main urban functions of the big metropolises, as well as to provide the city with a new cityscape

and improved spaces for social public life and productive activities. The major differences were

derived from the technological, economic and social contexts in which they originated from. During

the 1960s the emphasis was on the post-war reconstruction, and the city was seen as the natural

center of industrial activities and infrastructural terminals, which in turn caused urban sprawl and

pollution. In the 1980s, the shift of the economic base from industry to the service sector, and the

importance of leisure and financial activities in a global economy, prompted the cities to rely on

private capitals to develop new service facilities and offices spaces to expand their urban functions.

The burst of the economic bubble during the 1990s has for now concluded the trend for new

mega-project developments in favour of more local centered development and projects with a

“human scale” dimension, which during the last few years has shifted the public attention especially

towards the urban renewal of small areas along the coastlines and the river fronts of the cities, such

as in case of the canals of Tokyo and Osaka.

Acknowledgments

The investigation for this work was supported with a generous grant by the JSPS - Japanese Society for the

Promotion of Sciences in 2007-2009. A precedent version of this paper has been published in the Journal of

Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ - Architectural Institute of Japan), No. 642, August 2009, under


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the title: “Japanese Urban Artificial Islands: An Overview of Projects and Schemes for Marine Cities during

1960s-1990s”. The present text has been re-edited by the author in May 2012. References and Notes

1 For more details on the projects on Tokyo Bay in the postwar years, see: - Raffaele Pernice, “The Transformation of Tokyo During

the 1950s and the Early 1960s. Projects between City Planning and Urban Utopia”, JAABE - Journal of Asian Architecture and

Building Engineering, Vol. 5, No. 2, November 2006, pp. 253-260. 2 To give an idea of the astonishing pace of cargo trade development of the time, for instance Nagoya port increased the amount of

total shipments from 529.000 tons in 1951 to 7.000.000 tons in 1971 (data from Nagoya Port Maritime Museum). 3 This topic has been extensively discussed by many scholars; among the most interesting: Andre Sorensen, The Making of Urban

Japan. Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-first Century, Routledge, London & New York, 2002; Hein Carola, Ishida

Yorifusa, Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945, Palgrave Macmillian Ltd, 2003. 4 See: Raffaele Pernice, “The Issue of Tokyo Bay’s Reclaimed Lands as the Origin of Urban Utopias in Modern Japanese

Architecture”: AIJ - Journal of Architecture and Planning, N. 267, March 2007, pp. 259-266; concerning the issue of the infill works

in Tokyo Bay see also: Kokusai Kenchiku, Vol. 12, N. 12, December 1958. 5 For a concise overview of Maki end Otaka’s Group Form and other projects introduced at World Design Conference, see : Kindai

Kenchiku, Special Issue: World Design Conference, Vol.14, No.5, May 1960. 6 Kikutake’s “Marine City” project was presented by Kenzo Tange at CIAM meeting in Otterloo in 1959. 7 See for instance MARS Group’s ‘London Plan’ (1938); Paris’ metropolitan region plan (1959), Amsterdam’s ‘Pampus Plan’ (1965). 8 See for instance the “utopian” projects by Buckminster Fuller, Jona Friedman, Walter Jonas and western architects in the 1960s; on

the issue of marine cities in the same period see: Peter Raisbeck, “Marine and Underwater Cities 1960-1975”, Paper presented at

XIXth Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane, 2002. 9 For instance, in 1958 was completed the development of key piers and wharfs of the new Tokyo International Trade Fair on Harumi

reclamation, together with the completion of the berths for the new Kobe International Terminal. 10 Early examples of marine structures and “man made” lands can be seen in the XII century floating pavilion of Itsukushima

(Hiroshima) and others artificial islands built during Edo period at Daishima (Nagasaki), Kobe, Hiroshima. 11“The First Five-Year Port Development Plan”, conceived as instruments to face the shortage of port and harbour capacity, was

linked to the famous Ikeda’s national economic plan to “Double the People’s Income” (1962), and simultaneously was related to the

“Law on Emergency Measures for Port Development” (1961) and the “Law to Promote the Construction of New Industrial Cities”

(1962). The combined effect of these legal measures was to boast the construction of multiple infrastructures, ports and industrial

facilities on waterfronts and reclaimed lands to cope with the immediate consequences of the high economic period. Source: Japanese

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Official Website - Port and Harbours Bureau. 12 Port Island and Rokko Island have an extension of 443 ha and 595 ha, with a population estimated in 20000 and 30000

respectively; in both of them the ratio of land use for port facilities and berths is more than 50%. See: Kobe City Official Website:

www.city.kobe.jp/kigyo-yuchi/; Kobe Port and Harbors Office: www.pa.kkr.mlit.go.jp/kobeport/ 13See: Sato Asaito “Global City in Development State. Urban Restructuring in Tokyo, Planning Research Conference, London,

March 2000; Paul Walley, “Tokyo-as-World-City: Reassessing the Role of Capital and the State in Urban Restructuring”, in: Urban

Studies, Vol.44, No.8, 1465-1490, July 2007. 14 See: Andre Sorensen, “Subcenters and Satellite Cities: Tokyo’s 20th Century Experience of Planned Polycentrism”, in:

International Planning Studies, Vol.6, No.1, pp. 9-32, 2001; other insights on the waterfront development along Japanese coasts

during the early 1980s in: Process Architecture, “Waterfront ”, Issue No. 52, November 1984. 15 In this regards there are striking resemblances with Kuro Kano plan of 1958. For Tange and Kurokawa’s plans see: Process

Architecture, “Kenzo Tange – 40 ans d’urbanisme et architecture”, Vol. 62, No. 73, June 1987; Kenzo Tange, “A Plan for Tokyo -

1986”, in: the Japan Architect (JA), Vol.62, 11-12/1987, No. 367-368, pp. 8-45; Kisho Kurokawa, “Neo Tokyo Plan 2025”, in: the

Japan Architect (JA), Vol.62, 11-12/1987, No. 367-368, pp. 46-67. 16 Eventually the works for Tokyo Teleport Town abruptly came to a stop in 1995; for further analysis of the project, see: Richard

Marshall, “Tokyo Rainbow Town”, p.41, in: Emerging Urbanity: Global Urban Projects in Asia Pacific Rim, Spon Press, London &

New York, 2003; Tetsuo Seguchi and Patrick Malone, “Tokyo: Waterfront Development and Social Needs”, pp.164-194, in: Patrick

Malone (edited by), City, Capital and Water, Routledge, London & New York, 1996; Jinnai Hidenobu, “Changes in the Urban

Structure of Tokyo and Problems of the Waterfront”, in: Rinio Bruttomesso (edited by), Waterfronts. A New Frontier for Cities on

Water, Acts of the International Symposium in Venice (Italy), 1993, pp. 246-247. 17 For a criticism of the marine new towns see: Yoshimitsu Shiozaki, “Residential Environment of Housing Estates on Artifical

Islands”, in: AIJ - Journal of Architectural Planning and Engineering, No. 472, June 1995, translated and revised in: Yoshimitsu

Shiozaki and Patrick Malone, “Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe: Island City Paradise?”, pp.134-163, in: Patrick Malone (edited by), City,

Capital and Water, Routledge, London & New York, 1996. 18 Shouki Ohama, Yoshishige Itoh, “Promotion of Artificial Island Construction in Japan”, in: Susan D. Hasley, Robert B. Abel

(edited by), Coastal Ocean Space Utilization, Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Coastal Ocean Space Utilization,

May 8-10, New York, 1989, p. 248. 19 For a concise overview of the projects of Mega-float and other ocean engineering achievements in Japan see: Kenji Hotta,

“Offshore Construction and Ocean Space Utilization”, in: Jiyu Chen, Doeke Eisma, Kenji Hotta and Jesse Walker (edited by),

Engineered Coasts, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2002.

modern japanese waterfront developments - global vs. local

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