Tokaido Megalopolis: lessons from a shrinking mega-conurbation

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the challenges posed by giant polycentric city-regions from the perspective of an analysis of the Tokaido Megalopolis, the first case of this urban scale in Asia. Many of the issues faced by today’s mega-conurbations were identified in Tokaido 60 years ago, but at a very different moment in world history, and with different interpretations of major challenges and possible policy responses. The paper makes four main points: first is that timing is important in urban development, particularly in relation to prevailing ideas and norms about planning. Second, even if complexity means that to an important extent mega-conurbations are self-organizing systems, they are still shaped by planning institutions both at the large scale with major infrastructure, and at smaller scales through regulation. Third, the institutions and rules structuring land development are profoundly important politically, economically, and in structuring long-run spatial and social equity outcomes, including distribution of the costs and benefits of urbanization. Finally, the emergence of any particular mega-conurbation is likely to be a once-only affair, and contingent patterns and processes of development will have long-term consequences for the urbanism achieved, and for the urban societies produced. These have important planning implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Mega-conurbation
• planning institutions
• developmental state
• urban property system
• shrinking population
• megaregion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Japanese planners and academics enthusiastically adopted Gottman’s term megalopolis. In Japanese ‘Tokaido Megalopolis’ (東海道メガロポリス) combined the three Japanese characters to/kai/do (East/Sea/Road), and phonetic katakana script to directly transliterate ‘megaroporisu’.

2. A major component of this research was the POLYNET project let by Peter Hall and Kathy Pain (Hall and Pain 2006), with the policy implications published in the special issue of the journal Built Environment (Halbert, Convery, and Thierstein 2006), and theoretical and methodological papers published in a special issue of Regional Studies (Hoyler, Kloosterman, and Sokol 2008).

3. Tokaido in this count is the area including the 16 prefectures along the Pacific coast from Tokyo to Osaka: Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Saitama, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Shizuoka, Aichi, Gifu, Mie, Shiga, Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo. This corresponds closely to the area indicated by Doi (1968) in his mapping of the region. Source: 2015 Population Census of Japan https://www.e-stat.go.jp

4. It is possible that one major exception to this rule is the creation of regional scale park systems. While local parks can always be inserted into the urban fabric after urbanization, large-scale parks are likely to be prohibitively expensive at that point, and the best locations will usually be occupied by high value uses. As William Whyte (1968) argued, the best time to create regional park systems is before urban development, and in most places the logical location is river floodplains, which should in any case be protected for long-run water quality and flood protection, and can be the basis of connected park systems and trails throughout urban regions. In Tokaido, mountains and a few large rivers provided the only large-scale breaks in what is otherwise continuous development of all relatively level land.