4 Jul
My local flower and plant store was marketing bitter melon plants as “super eco.” Claims include that it is fast growing, requires no pesticide, provides shade, the vegetable is full of Vitamin C and beta-carotine, and that it absorbs carbon dioxide. Most home vegetables and vines would offer the same benefits, no? I wonder if this eco marketing is helpful or misleading.
3 Jul
Nodai’s Environmental Science department designed a small park and green walls around a public toilet just outside of campus. It’s a mix of moss and euphorbia. Apparently, this common North American plant has been recently introduced to Japan. I like the variety of colors. It’s too bad the moss has turned yellow.
Below is a sign explaining the project.
2 Jul
Fiber City: Tokyo 2050 is a vision of the future of Tokyo with a radically new balance between natural and built environment, conceived by Professor Ohno Hidetoshi of Tokyo University. I am fascinated by how this future vision responds to four urban challenges that involve shrinking: decreasing population, aging society, environmental crisis, and earthquake potential.
The overall vision is that a shrinking economy makes many facilities and houses surplus, freeing up land for a green city. While unprecedented population declines have been predicted for Japan due to falling birthrate and continued resistance to immigration, I wonder if the metropolis will shrink as much as the countryside. Nonetheless, Fiber City provides new models for urban living in greater harmony with nature, with better access to mass transit, and improved livability with reclamation of historic features like Edo canals and bridges that have been covered by elevated expressways.
The four strategies include Green Fingers (image above), Green Web, Green Partition, and Uban Wrinkle. Taken together, they allow for greater green space, more mobility, reclamation of history, re-use of elevated freeways, emergency access for disasters, and restoration of historic urban features. As a visionary view of Tokyo, from macro to micro, Fiber City provides a model for global cities retrofitting for enviornmental and human benefits.
1 Jul
On Monday I visited my new friend Pierre Alex’s “tokyobsession” art opening of drawings, whose subject is Tokyoites. A French product designer, Pierre is a talented illustrator, and this collection of drawings captures many of the themes that animate Tokyo Green Space and my fascination for this city.
Tokyobsession turned out to be over 50 line drawings on photograph paper, each folded in half. In form, they correspond to the sketch books he uses to capture scenes of Tokyo: parks, freeways, alleys, sidewalks, commercial areas, cafes, and the people who animate the city. Using photo paper highlights the quick and “snapshot” quality of his talented drawings, and suggest the perspective of an outsider looking in.
Pierre told me that he enjoys how Tokyo is the “anti-Haussmann” city: unplanned, chaotic, grassroots rather than top-down, improvisational, and anarchistic. The city’s built environment, including buildings and parks, is in many ways not beautiful, but it is how people create urban spaces and live their lives in a blurring of public and private spaces that make the city so charming, captivating, and livable.
Pierre’s view of Tokyo, in words and even more so in drawings, also echo a recent blog commenter’s email to me. This writer told me about her appreciation of the unusual resident-authority relation in Japanese cities that spurs ordinary urban residents to create greenery and community in even the most unlikely places.
I marveled at Pierre’s talent for not just seeing the city but for capturing it in drawings that reveal everyday scenes and the city’s spirit.
Update: After this post, I realized two things. The images at the cafe spelled out the show’s title (see photo below). And many of the images are in Pierre’s blog called “tokyobsession” (in French and illustrated).
26 Jun
Dwell magazine has a great article about San Franciscans’ digging up their sidewalks and planting gardens. Much of the credit is due to Jane Martin and her organization Plant*SF, which has helped neighbors and corporations turn concrete into habitat for plants, wildlife and community.
Martin estimates that 15,000 square feet of pavement have been replaced by public sidewalk gardens that absorb rainwater and require no irrigation. I like how Martin describes her test for native plants: “I’m an Iowa girl, so I learned about natives by planting stuff and leaving town. Whatever was alive when I returned passed the test.”
Compared to San Francisco, Tokyo’s climate, with almost year-round rain, offers an even greater potential for plant life in public spaces with minimal care. With so many avid gardeners growing such a variety of plants in small pots, I can only imagine how much more impact they would have if they received government or nonprofit help to dig up the concrete and plant directly in the earth.
25 Jun
One of my neighbors cultivates her entrance and the side of the street along her building. Recently she showed me that she is growing rice in three small plastic buckets. I am impressed with this small bit of urban farming, so evocative of Japan’s agriculture and scaled for the city.
Her small garden spans public and private space, and is constantly changing by season; last month was hydrangea and peony, now rice and roses. She is constantly present on the street taking care of her plants and chatting with passer-bys. Her presence is reminiscent of the urban life created by Baltimore “stoops,” marble block steps, yet without the steps.
24 Jun
Nodai’s Garden Design Lab, part of the Landscape Architecture Department, invited me to their student workshop and welcome party last week. To help everyone get to know each other, students organized a workshop on the differences between country and city (田舎と都市, inaka and toshi).
It was fun to participate. The structure was very open-ended and interesting. In tables of about 8 people each, we brainstormed, using post-it notes, and then grouping them into categories. Actually, this framework reminded me of corporate workshops I have attended and organized.
Our group finished by allowing students to situate themselves on a country-city continuum. The nerdy guy who lives in Akihabara and I were the super-city participants, and I was struck that even our small group had a wide range of self-identification including super-country.
Students come from a variety of places, and more than a few seem to be children of garden business families. There were several graduate students over 40, three from China, one from Brazil, and an associate who also comes from Maryland by way of Brown University and Barcelona.
The workshop was followed by eating and drinking, first in the Lab, and then at an izakaya across the street. Suzuki sensei gallantly paid the large tab. I felt very welcomed and very fortunate to participate in this dynamic environment.
23 Jun
Last week I heard Peter Head of ARUP present “Entering the Ecological Age,” the Brunel Lecture for the Institute of Civil Engineers. Director of ARUP’s “integrated urbanism” practice, Head focuses attention on the potential devastation of climate change and the role of cities in launching a new ecological era that uses renewable energy efficiently.
Head’s most sobering prediction is that by 2100 there is a 50% chance of earth temperature rising by more than 5 degrees celsius, which would lead to the end of human civilization.
The solution is massive reduction in carbon dioxide by retrofitting old cities and building new ones organized around non-polluting transportation. Surpassed only by Australia, the US uses twice the energy per capita of Japan and Europe because of its reliance on the automobile as the primary transportation vehicle and the great distances between housing, work, schools and shopping.
I was interested in Head’s advocacy for “biomimicry.” Janine Benyus’ 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovations Inspired by Nature lists ten principles include uses water as a resource, diversity and cooperate, gather and use energy efficiently, optimise not maximise, use materials sparingly, clean up not pollute, do not draw down resources, remain in balance with the biosphere, run on information, and use local resources.
I also found it interesting that Head believes cities are the most dynamic and capable of meeting the challenges of the post-industrial age. He cites the work of C40 Cities as climate leaders. Some urban initiatives he cites are Seoul’s removal of a freeway above the Cheonggyecheon River, and Singapore’s introduction of dragonfly habitats to reduce mosquitoes and dengue fever.
Head advocates an 80% carbon reduction by 2050 (compared with 1990 levels), which will require massive change in advanced and developing countries. His work seeks to contribute to the 2009 COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen (Convention on Climate Change), the most important since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
You can download a lengthly PDF version of the talk on the ARUP website, and watch video of the lecture on a website called Resilient Futures.
20 Jun
Japanese corporations are funding innovations in urban ecology. Suntory, one of Japan’s largest beverage companies, has a subsidiary called Suntory Midorie that creates green roofs and green walls. Examples of their work are on display in Shibuya and used on Suntory’s Tokyo headquarters.
Gaia Initiative is a non-profit that brings together corporate leaders and academics to promote environmentalism. They are currently sponsoring anthropologist Takemura Shinichi’s Tangible Earth, a giant globe that provides live data about global warming, climate change, and disaster prevention. The adviser list includes CEOs of leading companies such as Benese, Pasona, Mitsui Fudosan, Doutor Coffee, and Asahi Breweries.
A great source for news in English on Japan’s corporate eco initiatives is CScout Japan, a trend research company. Check out their blog’s “eco” tag.
I wonder if there is this much corporate activism in Europe and the United States. And in Japan, I wonder how corporations can best work with ordinary gardeners to transform cities into urban forests.
19 Jun
A friend in San Francisco sent me this Reuters news story about a municipal government program in Suginami ward to plant flowers facing the street as a crime prevention measure. The article cites a city official saying, “The best way to prevent crime is to have more people on the lookout.” According to city officials, encouraging street flowers has lowered burglaries by 80% from 2002 to 2008. Read the full article.
19 Jun
I recently returned to Tokyo from a trip to the US that included a formal meeting with my fellowship sponsor and visits to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and New York.
In the US, urban ecology initiatives seem particularly strong at the municipal government and individual levels. In the photo above, I spotted an amazing formal garden extending on one side of second floor apartment. Perhaps the plants are kept small to preserve light and views from inside.
26 May
Dokudami (どくだみ) is one of my favorite Tokyo weeds. It grows on cinder block walls and sidewalk cracks. Above is a large patch in front of my apartment building in May. The roughly 2 by 5 meter strip is a never changing display of flowers tended by the residents; its wildness contrasts with the clipped hedge on the other side of the entry path and heavily pruned trees in the parking lot.
Here are some other May flowers, including what is called in Japan “American jasmine.” The middle two plants I do not know the names. The last one is Datura, originally from Mexico.
25 May
Above is a photo of a Nakano sidewalk on a busy boulevard. Between pedestrians and the street is an organized planted green strip with railing, ginko trees and azalea bushes. In May, seemingly out of nowhere, giant pink hollyhocks have appeared. What is amazing is that they extend over 1 kilometer on the sunny north side of the boulevard. Someone must have planted a few, which then went viral.
Below is a sidewalk and street in Odaiba, with corporate planting on the left and public planting on the right. Despite the greater green quotient, this Odaiba sidewalk is generally lacking in street traffic, pedestrian traffic and any un-planned greenery. There is something dead and sad about these streets, where large convention centers, a few offices and shopping malls are interspersed with empty lots.
23 May
This week I had the great pleasure of meeting Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, the most celebrated foreign architects in Tokyo and founders of Pecha Kucha, a monthly public get-together where young designers from every field are invited to present 20 slides for 20 seconds each (a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds). Pecha Kucha is now in 198 cities around the world, and KDa architecture has just celebrated its 20th anniversary with a retrospective at Gallery Ma in Roppongi.
Klein and Dytham’s office is on the second floor of a low-slung 1960s office with a terrazzo stairwell and unremarkable exterior. From the outside, it could hardly be further from the playful and modern buildings and interiors that they create for their clients.
Their work as designers and community-builders is very inspiring for me. Klein and Dytham through boom and malaise have made a success in Tokyo by both adapting to local culture and being outsiders who use displacement to their advantage. Their work includes ordinary objects in unexpected contexts: the circular mirror on a stick at small intersections is repurposed as a delightful viewing mechanism for a top of Roppongi Hills museum cafe, and they used the garish, dancing light sign posts favored by soba and massage shops to frame photos of their work at the retrospective. I also like how they fit bold designs in cramped urban spaces overloaded with conbinis (convenience stores) and other clutter.
Their philosophy centers on fun, delight and feeling alive. They have done some interesting green projects in the past, including a temporary green wall in the early 00s outside of Ando Tadao’s Omotesando Hills. I think their work would be a great fit with the green design of Tase Michio, who also conveys a sense of being alive by surrounding human life with an exuberance of plant, animal and soil life.
One thing Astrid told me sticks with me. She admires the nonchalance of Tokyo people doing cool things and making things without remark or requesting recognition. So do I.
22 May
In an earlier post, I talked a little about Gobai Midori, or 5x緑’s street beautification products and the creative force behind this small green business Tase Michio. This post uses photos from their website to explore their idea of restoring the countryside, or satoyama(里山), and bringing it into the city.
The photos above illustrate the concept of carving a piece of rural nature into a modular square. Gobai Midori plants these bio-diversity trays on modular metal cubes with up to five sides for plants and special light-weight soil. Applications include residential entrances, sidewalks and balconies, apartment and office buildings, green walls, rooftops, neighborhood planters, boulevard and highway guard rails, interiors, benches, and special events. They have targeted individuals, governments (including amazing, yet unrealized plans for greening Kabukicho and Marunouchi), developers and construction companies.
These are some images of how plant trays are cultivated to include a multitude of species in a small area.
