TOKYO
Land Use Policy
A case study of Tokyo was conducted between the years of 1974 and 1979 and it was found that 394 hectares were lost from agricultural and undeveloped land to developments on making room to mostly residential areas. The increase in urban land was 521 hectares about two-thirds in the form of low-rise low-density residential land. The fastest growing categories in this case study was high-rise residential developments or condominiums and low-rise density terraced-house schemes, which are called minikaihatsu or pocket handkerchief developments.[1]
Visitors from Europe and America to Tokyo often find the city lacking of a clear structure and regretted the absence of a visual relation between the
infrastructure and the buildings. They also criticized the so-called “pencil
buildings”, the narrow gaps between buildings and the apparent lack of
building control.[2]
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Figure 1. Mt. Fuji [Source]
The book from Hanayama [3] mentions that the land acreage of Tokyo is about 7,609 sq km and that together with the cities of Osaka and Nagoya, they represent about 5.9 percent of the total land space of Japan. The current population of Tokyo is approximately 37.6 million people and again together with the other cities mentioned accounted for 40.8 percent of the total of Japan in the year of 1986 when the book was written. The acreage of the Tokyo region within 50km from its center is 7,609 sq km and in 1986 when the population was 22 million, it represented 347 sq of land space per person, which is notably small compared to the average of the three cities. The book also mentions one of the most significant legacies from the high economic growth period was the myth that land prices will inevitably keep increasing, thus people borrowed money to buy land while its prices were still within their reach. They thought that by owning the land, the annually land’s value will increase by 20%. While it is a fact that land prices continue to rise every year, the fact that it happened in the past, does not necessarily mean that it will in the future, that is why is consider a myth rather than a fact. I think it is almost undeniable that prices will rise but land prices usually depend in several factors such as location, proximity to public transportation and several other factors that they will be discussed in the entirety of out project.
References:
[1] Hein, Carola. Shaping Tokyo: Land Development and Planning Practice in the Early Modern Japanese Metropolis (2010). Journal of Urban History. Sage Publications.
[2] Tamagawa, Hidenori. Sustainable Cities: Japanese Perspectives on Physical and Social Structures (2006). United Nations University Press.
[3] Hanayama, Yuzuru. Land Markets and Land Policy in a Metropolitan Area. A Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Book (1986). Oelgeshlager, Gunn & Hain.