Yokochos have a unique management structure - each lot is owned by an individual proprietor and the alleys are not public land but shared private property among all the landowners and maintained by them. Golden Gai landowners have faced pressures from developers to sell up so that the plots can be consolidated but in 1986, some bar owners banded together to protect their interests.

Bertaud explores the role of zoning and planning alongside the emergent factors that affect the growth of cities. I recently read a very interesting book on urban planning (or lack of planning) in Tokyo, entitled Emergent Tokyo. Because of Japan’s light touch zoning it is relatively easy to build housing in Tokyo, and thus the city is not as “unaffordable” as you might expect. It's given me an inspiring new framework for understanding cities, and I'm inspired to see how I can work to encourage more "emergent urbanism" in my own city of Seattle. It look into six Tokyo urban design patterns, how they evolved, the experience they foster and how they are threatened by corporate development.

Subsequently, those built in the 1960s and 1970s were built with the commercial use of undertrack space explicitly in mind.

Additionally, this book succeeds excellently in explaining Tokyo's development as a result of just one historical path that is not a uniquely Japanese or Asian, but could have resulted in a Western city given different urban and political constraints.

Emergent Tokyo seeks to unpack the conditions - the interplay between buildings, infrastructure, local culture and practices, legal codes and ground up responses to these conditions - that led to Tokyo's unique cityscape.

His professional practice in Japan includes award-winning community spaces as provocative public space interventions. A unique look at Tokyo from architectural and commercial communities' and (briefly) historical perspectives. Quand les auteurs tentent de dresser le portrait des tendances actuelles, ils sont obnubilés par la vision manichéenne du corporatisme contre les forces émergentes. I can't evaluate the quality of this book's content, as the type size on my copy was so small that, for the first time in my long-time reading experience, the book (in paperback, at least) proved impossible to read. Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive.

Emergent Tokyo explores the city's conditions of development by examining 5 Tokyo patterns: yokocho alleyways; multi-tenant zakkyo buildings; undertrack infills; ankyo streets; dense low-rise neighbourhoods. This is an incredible book for anybody interested in urbanism, and particularly in how localized, small scale patterns of urban development have emerged in Tokyo that define the city and make it what it is. It explains various aspects of the Georgian and Regency house and provides a comprehensive guide to the houses of this period. I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative. Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world's cities.