The waterfront is an asset of the city! Making the most of its history and accumulation of landscapes!

Tokyo's waterfront is interesting now!

Kiyosumishirakawa in Koto-ku, Tokyo, is currently using various methods to revitalize the city. In the Onagi River and Sendai Bori River areas, former factories, warehouses, and townhouse buildings have been converted into cafes and restaurants, attracting young people who had rarely seen them before. In some places, residents themselves are expressing contemporary art by transforming spaces with objects, sound, and video. Through the earthquake and war damage, Tokyo's residential areas have spread to the western suburbs, and the eastern side of the city has been rather left behind in development. This is why we have been able to utilize and revitalize the diverse and historic stock of architecture and space. In today's Tokyo, the district is truly a "one lap behind the front runner.

Seeking the ideal image of a water city

In the 1980s, Japanese cities were in the midst of a waterfront boom. Tokyo was at the forefront, and Hakodate, Fukuoka, and other cities were developing a variety of waterfront revitalization projects. However, as an undergraduate studying architecture at the time, I found that many of these projects were based on examples from the United States and other Western countries. I wondered if there was a more Japanese or Asian approach to the waterfront. This is how I began my journey to break away from the Western-centered framework unconsciously prevailing in the engineering world and to seek a different model in Asia.

As a graduate student, I spent two years studying abroad in Shanghai, China, starting in 1989. I immersed myself in my research by conducting thorough measurements and interviews in Suzhou, the famous water city, and surrounding small water towns, and by reading the archives of literature. Since then, until today, my research on the ideal image of water and cities in Asia, including Japan, has continued for nearly 30 years, including the strait city of Singapore, city groups along the Chao Phraya River in Thailand, cities and settlements in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the sacred waterside sites of Varanasi, India, and the relationship between the territory of castle towns and sacred sites in Japan The research has been ongoing for nearly 30 years.

Experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake

In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami left 20,000 people dead or missing. Other Asian cities are also experiencing frequent floods, with the World Bank reporting in 2012 that Asia accounts for about 40% of the world's total floods, and more than 90% of the people at risk live in Asia.

Water, which should have been controlled by modern land development and the construction of breakwaters, destroys much and takes lives in an instant, far beyond human expectations and science and technology. From the experience of these disasters, I felt as if I had been hit over the head with a slap in the face. I felt that the time has come for us to overcome the logic of modernity and rethink from the bottom up how humanity should live in harmony with nature on the earth. People cannot live without water. In addition, in Asia, water has been the object of human faith more than anything else, and water itself has been the spiritual center of the people as something sacred. The fear of water and the awe with which it was treated led to a desire to live near it. It was not to resist disasters by force, nor was it to focus only on the functional aspects of water transportation and water supply, but it was far more significant for people to live close to water. Such a history exists for a long time in Asia.

Toward New Historical Research on Cities and Architecture

In the Great East Japan Earthquake, we learned that while towns and buildings were destroyed by the tsunami, shrines on higher ground escaped damage. This made me realize that there might actually be a more important relationship between water sanctuaries, urban areas, and the underlying structure of natural landforms and environments in ancient and medieval times before cities were established. The natural landforms and geology form the foundation on which the humanistic cultural substratum is built, and they form the basis of the later urban and regional context and structure in which people's activities develop. I thought that by viewing the city in this way, I would be able to understand the city of water more accurately.

As soon as I began my new research, I realized that in many castle towns such as Osaka and Edo, the city was strongly connected to the topography and geology of the area, and that in many cases, people wished for the peace and tranquility of the people by placing sacred water sites there. The logic of Japanese urban creation, in which the environmental space of a city is read within an overall framework that includes both the center and the periphery, and the overall planning is carried out while establishing a central urban area, has come to the fore through the sacred sites of water.

Mission of the Edo-Tokyo Research Center

At the end of 2017, the University was selected for support under the Private University Research Branding Project of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and established the Edo Tokyo Research Center on campus. From the era when people fully enjoyed the inherent versatility of the space despite the threat of water, through the next modern era when people actively used water to promote industrialization, we are now accumulating attempts to restore the richness of the space once we have moved away from water. In the 21st century, the age of the environment, how can we maintain a better symbiotic relationship with nature's bounty and interact with it in a variety of ways?

TUAT has a number of Edo scholars on its faculty, including President Tanaka. On the other hand, there are many faculty members at TUAT who pursue research with a free spirit, even if their research does not focus on Edo Tokyo. What do you see when you slide your own method into Edo Tokyo, rather than just a comparative theory? We aim to conduct new Edo Tokyo research that is a little different from conventional academics, full of novelty and challenging approaches.

(First published in the October 2018 issue of Hosei, a public relations magazine)