An Alternative History of Housing in the World’s First Megacity
The UN defines a megacity as an urban area with a population in excess of ten million. Tokyo's population reached the 10 million mark around 1960. By some counts it is the world's largest city today. But the issue when one speaks of megacities is not just size: the term is associated with a particular form of urbanism, believed to have arisen only in the second half of the twentieth century, characterized by informal settlement and a lack of planning controls.
Although Tokyo has a reputation as a well regulated first-world metropolis with a law-abiding middle-class populace, it lacks a clear street plan. Residential neighborhoods ringing the city show the signs of having been built on former farmland with roads following old footpaths and irregular building lots determined by no rational overall scheme. These features suggest a trait commonly attributed to third-world megacities: settlement formed by illegal or quasi-legal land occupations. How has Tokyo's housing development been characterized by processes similar to the growth of favelas in Brazil, barrios de invasión in Colombia, bidonvilles in French Africa, gecekondu in Turkey, and other shanty towns that ultimately become incorporated into the city, acquiring infrastructure and in some cases land titles for squatter residents? In addition to in-migration accommodated by a sprawl of new suburban neighborhoods, repeated disasters drove refugees from the city to resettle in farmland outside Tokyo's urban area. Building regulation tended to be loose in these places. In at least some cases refugee settlements became permanent residential districts as a result. By examining the social and legal framework for housing construction and infrastructure provision in peripheral neighborhoods from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, this paper will reconsider Tokyo's urban growth as a potential prototype of the contemporary megacity.