Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World

by Mohsen Mostafavi (Editor), Kayoko Ota (Editor)

Overview

Sharing Tokyo is a collection of essays and drawings on the theme of sharing the urban space of Tokyo.

The book questions how “artifice” and the “social world” can be mutually and constructively integrated so that the contemporary urban space can be shared by all. A variety of innovative practices are presented by a diverse group of contributors including renowned scholars, architects, urbanists, and photographers from Japan and the US, and the research team at the Harvard UniversityGraduate School of Design. While the discourses and architectural works presented deal with the specificity of Tokyo, they were carefully selected to formulate together a collection of insights, new perspectives, and speculative experiments in urbanism and architecture that can also be used in other contexts.

With contributions by: Mustafa K. Abadan, Shin Aiba, Homi K. Bhabha, Kenta Hasegawa, Kozo Kadowaki, Hiroto Kobayashi, Masami Kobayashi, Japan Research Initiative Team at Harvard GSD, Jouji Kurumado, Seiji M. Lippit, Mitsuyoshi Miyazaki, Mayumi Mori, Mohsen Mostafavi, Jo Nagasaka, Erika Nakagawa, Don O’keefe, Yoshihiko Oshima, Kayoko Ota, Jordan Sand, Yoshihiko Sone, Tsubame Architects, Riken Yamamoto, Shun Yoshie

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781638400608
Publisher:	Actar D
Publication date:	03/14/2023
Pages:	428
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.40(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mohsen Mostafavi is an architect and educator who served as dean of the Harvard UniversityGraduate School of Design. As a professor of design, he is now leading the Japan Research Initiative, among other programs. His books include Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017). 

Kayoko Ota is an architectural curator and editor. Before joining the Japan Research Initiative at the Harvard UniversityGraduate School of Design, she curated Japan-based projects for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and was commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale.

Read an Excerpt

What does it mean to speak of sharing the city? Isn’t the city always shared by its inhabitants, by all those who live and work there? One would expect the answer to such a question to be an emphatic yes. But invariably this idealism is not matched by the reality of the situation. In the case of Tokyo, like many other metropolitan cities around the globe, new urban developments have been unable to respond with the same degree of interest and commitment to the needs of their diverse communities. Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World, responds to this situation by re-imagining and recalibrating future developments with the aim of enhancing the city’s capacity to be shared by all.

Editorial Reviews

"Tokyo is a place where small grass-roots neighborhood projects arise in the interstices between massive developments.  Sharing Tokyo analyzes these conflicting trends and demonstrates how the tension between economic activity and humanity serves as the engine for a city in a constant state of transition."  —Toyo Ito

"This book offers an astute and comprehensive look at a new movement that seeks to address the very serious problems Tokyo faces intuited by many residents, but which are difficult to grasp without a broader speculative framework."  —Shigeru Ban

"Nicely illustrated throughout, "Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World" is an original, informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the growing library of Architectural Criticism and Urban/Land Use Planning that is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, corporate, college, and university library Architecture collections and supplemental curriculum Architectural Studies lists."  —Midwest Book Review

"The authors take up the two main features of urban transformation — the large scale development model and the small scale model of the neighborhood development — and instead look for alternative ideas and new strategies."  —Cube Magazine

From the Publisher