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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Japan is famed for its flourishing urban life, with peerless infrastructure and vibrant urban density. The bewildering image below is Tokyo's rail map, the world's most extensive network, and one of the true wonders of the world. But it was not always so. Japan entered the twentieth century with large but impoverished cities, whose infrastructure was exceptionally poor. Most of these were then destroyed by war. Japan developed perhaps the best cities of the modern world in spite of some of the worst starting conditions. An important part of the explanation lies in a policy called ‘land readjustment’.
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Tokugawa cities obviously did not have trains, trams, buses or cars. More surprisingly, they made little use of wheeled transport, relying on pack animals, canals and porters. This meant they only needed narrow and crooked roads. The Shogunate divided up commoner areas with
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Additionally, after the Second World War, the American occupying authorities redistributed Japanese rural land into very small plots, often just one hectare each. This hampered urban expansion, since the smallholders struggled to coordinate to provide infrastructure.
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
One way to build infrastructure is for the state to expropriate land for it. This works better in places with unified land ownership, where landowners who lose land to infrastructure *also* benefit from the uplift that the infrastructure brings to their remaining land. It works
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Japan’s solution was land readjustment, a policy invented in C19 Germany. Landowners contribute a share of their land for infrastructure, which increases the value of the remaining land by opening it up for development. The remaining land is then redistributed among the
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Japanese readjustment schemes can generally only proceed with supermajority support from the affected landowners. However, since they tend to increase the value of landowners’ plots – often greatly – this is not necessarily hard to secure.
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Land readjustment was first used after the destruction of Tokyo in the 1923 earthquake. The entire city centre was replanned and endowed with a superb road system (left). Along these roads ran one of the world’s largest tram networks, totalling several thousand kilometres of
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Land readjustment was used across urban Japan after the Second World War, and across the Japanese countryside as cities expanded through areas affected by land reform. Some cities, like Nagoya, were almost entirely planned through readjustment.
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Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
Land readjustment of one kind or another accounts for 30 percent of Japan’s urban land, 12,500 kilometers of city road, 150 square kilometers of urban park (half the country’s total area of community, neighborhood and district parks), and 1,000 station plazas.
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Regional Tom - Community Motive at Every Scale
@tomchristoffel
If you have a surplus of military engineers and no work for them after WWII those people and national funding can go to City rebuilding and growth. There being no excess of land, it has to be very efficient. It was not a Soviet target. The opposite was true in the United States.
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1st Roboeconomist, Church of the pointed finger
@climatebabes
Its shows cities are obstacles. Tokyo citizens can barely survive in tiny homes. A city's only function is as a trading and meeting place for rural community. Other than that its function is to make money for banks as people try to survive in them. Tokyo is an economistic
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Jan Bear
@janvbear
Why has Japan fallen off the demographic cliff? The culture is beautiful and all that, so why did they commit cultural suicide?
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K100
@kdcc100
"Japan is famed for its flourishing urban life, with peerless infrastructure and vibrant urban density. The bewildering image below is Tokyo's rail map..." - land readjustment Not agreeing or disagreeing, but interesting. Grist for the mill.
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_anoneng
@_anoneng
Public transit and "diversity" cannot coexist. I stopped riding BART when "diversity" started robbing entire train cars and the authorities covered it up because "it might stoke racism" (guess what, it's stoking racism anyway)
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Deco
@teapot_lad
sammm please tell me. do you have a favourite city outside of london in england. for the sake of argument a city is above 200k
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