13 ms·

The Japanese Urban Zoning System

187 points by Osiris30 10y ago

atemerev 10y ago
SimCity is to blame. It cemented the current system. :)
- acbabis 10y ago
  I don't know why this was downvoted so much. This is actually a pretty clever summary of the article. Have an upvote.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Cyph0n 10y ago
I read the original article when it was posted to HN a while back. It's a bit too detailed, but provides a very comprehensive analysis of why the Japanese system just works.
saosebastiao 10y ago
I'm glad Tyler is talking about this, as he tends to be the leading edge of a lot of policy discussion around newish ideas, and the Japanese zoning system is a marvel of both efficacy and simplicity. While the Japanese system is implemented and managed on the national level, I can imagine this being more effective on a more granular level, while still being much higher up than the city level as to avoid the political repercussions of local special interest landowners.
- pauldino 10y ago
  Tyler may have talked about this elsewhere, but this post was written by Alex Tabarrok.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  I'd guess the state level is natural -- but then again some states in the US (and all states in Australia) are dominated by one big city, so the state government can also be captured by NIMBYs. Generally I dislike the way top-level governments are becoming the only game in town. But the point is to have multiple levels of government checking each other. When it comes to zoning: its the locals who are the "bad" guys.
  - twelvechairs 10y ago
    The problem is local governments are awful at planning for growth, especially in nice areas (where people actually want to live) as they tend towards no change. I think the best solution is still planning at a local level but there should be approppriate rules from a higher level to ensure it works - usually including a growth target which must be planned for and minimum densities (allowing for some exceptions) for different kidnds of locations (greenfield, around train stations, etc) On your other point - in my experience states tend towards the opposite - being developer lobby driven much more than nimby
codyb 10y ago
Very neat. I love reading about cities and urban planning. I have "The Death and Life of American Cities" by Jane Jacobs laying around which I need to read and I read another book about architecture here in New York City and how it has evolved over time in response to things such as fires and 9/11. Really really very interesting stuff. This was a great post. Mixed use cities are generally much more desirable in my eyes. The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system. Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens who live and have lived in a nation with huge amounts of racial segregation. The idea of a set of national guidelines makes sense from an engineering perspective because small towns can't afford engineers often (or may not even think to seek out their expertise) and in the end you have a group of individuals with no qualifications determining the fate of their town with arbitrarily decided rules. And rating things by their nuisance (traffic plus noise) levels is a really neat way to quantify whether a building should exist in a given area. Awesome! Lots of new things to entertain the mind.
- wott 10y ago
  > The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system. Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens. Unfortunately the same system was later exported to other countries and adopted by their citizens, although these countries did not have the same 'free' space. As a consequence the drawbacks of the system are even more perceptible (and the individual benefits are lesser) in these places.
  - spraak 10y ago
    E.g. where? I'm curious
- michaelbuddy 10y ago
contingencies 10y ago
It's not untrue to say that Japanese society as a whole does have a culture of Confucian orthodoxy/heirarchy, ie. people do not 'rock the boat' or 'aggressively agitate for change'. This means that tradition survives well and a cultural premium on internalizing discontent and preserving outward peace rules the land. Urban zoning is probably one of the areas most affected by this cultural property. That said, in my mind even traditional Japanese urban architecture is pretty well optimized for high density, itself largely based on Tang Dynasty Chang'an in China, arguably one of the greatest periods of multicultural tolerance and philosophical debate in the history of the planet (terminus of the Silk Road, vast exchange of ideas).
- twblalock 10y ago
  I'm not sure where to begin with this essentialist exaggeration. First of all, the history of Japanese agitation for change, especially in Tokyo, has been notable. Consider the massive protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s over security and labor unoin issues, and the protests against the establishment of Narita airport in the 1970s. Consider also Goto Shinpei's ambitious rebuilding of Tokyo, which had been destroyed in the 1923 Kanto earthquake, with a roads, parks, and a transit system inspired by the great cities of Europe and the US, not by Japanese tradition. Japan's current zoning system is a recent innovation, borne of the necessity of spurring growth during their long recession. The system it replaced was developed during the 20th century. You would have to look back before the late 19th century to find more traditional systems. This, along with the history of protest movements and the radical redesign of Tokyo in the 1920s, disproves the idea that Confucian orthodoxy and survival of tradition have much to do with Japan's zoning system. Furthermore, traditional Japanese urban buildings are not a whole lot like traditional Chinese urban buildings in their exterior appearance nor their interior layout.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    Not sure why you label generalisation essentialism? Your opinion appears biased in terms of: (a) 20th century; (b) Tokyo. IMHO, rebuilding can hardly be classed as agitating for change against tradition. Furthermore, while protest movements have of course existed I would argue that they are few and relatively late to develop (massive discontent precedes) relative to other societies. It is a fact that many of Japan's oldest buildings are direct derivations of Tang Dynasty architecture, and in some cases (Kyoto) city layouts (urban plans) were directly copied from China.
irq11 10y ago
Japan's property values haven't risen in the last 20 years because their economy is in the toilet, they're struggling with deflation, and their population is declining. When the economy was growing like crazy in the 80s, Japan had the most expensive real estate on the planet, and the same zoning they do now.
- ceras 10y ago
  > When the economy was growing like crazy in the 80s, Japan had the most expensive real estate on the planet, and the same zoning they do now. Are you sure? From Financial Times[1]: > During the 1980s Japan had a spectacular speculative house price bubble that was even worse than in London and New York during the same period, and various Japanese economists were decrying the planning and zoning systems as having been a major contributor by reducing supply,” says André Sorensen, a geography professor at the University of Toronto, who has written extensively on planning in Japan. ... > "To help the economy recover from the bubble, the country eased regulation on urban development," says Ichikawa. "If it hadn’t been for the bubble, Tokyo would be in the same situation as London or San Francisco." [1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c... * * * Edited to add: To your first point, if you restrict your consideration of Japan to Tokyo, you see the largest metropolis in the world with a growing population -- other cities in Japan are shrinking, but Tokyo is growing, yet Tokyo prices are steady. I'm not sure about its economic situation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Tokyo's economy was stronger than other parts of Japan. Regardless, it's important information that Tokyo alone is building more housing than the entirety of California (source: same FT article).
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    It's really difficult I imagine to attribute either planning laws or declining population and a poor economy as being exclusively the cause. Very interesting article none the less! I find it a strange effect of the London housing market that it benefits property developers to under deliver in house building as the supply and demand situation will, even with brexit, mean increasing house prices. What can be done to get the incentives right?
nxc18 10y ago
If this is an interesting topic, check out the book, Seeing Like a State. It has really great coverage of the history of things like urban planning, naming of people, mapping, etc. The standout thesis of the book is that from a birds-eye-view perspective (what the state sees), cities that were designed to meet the local needs of people look chaotic, but the ideal clean order from that perspective ignores needs of people. For example, a neighborhood with just houses connected by a highway to a commercial district looks clean and organized on a map. Only with boots on the ground do you see what a disaster that is compared to the model of having neighborhoods and boroughs with all of the community resources (housing, work, food, shopping, parks, schools, etc.) they need.
- snaky 10y ago
  > Alex Tabarrok discusses the case of India’s private city, and the challenges — and promise — of a private model of urbanization. http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-371-private-cities/ http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-371-private-cities/
- gedy 10y ago
  > The standout thesis of the book is that from a birds-eye-view perspective (what the state sees), cities that were designed to meet the local needs of people look chaotic That sounds exactly like big gov't promoters, and trying to solving things at the federal level.
masklinn 10y ago
> in the US zones tend to be exclusive but in Japan the zones limit the maximum nuisance in a zone It's not just japan, I'm not sure the US-style exclusive euclidian zoning is practiced anywhere else, if only for historical reasons: in most countries cities grew organically and mixed-use.
- stretchwithme 10y ago
  Probably very impractical arrangements can only survive when most people have the resources to compensate. In a country with few resources, it never even gets off the ground. And if it ever did, that could have been hundreds of years ago, longer than the US has to learn what works. When we are young, we can do many impractical things. But if we make it to being old, its likely we've let a lot of those things go. So too with cities.
- makomk 10y ago
  The UK is mixed-use pretty much everywhere, but you still need planning permission to change a property from residential to commercial or industrial use, or to change it between different classifications of each of those uses. From what I can tell there are legal and possibly even constitutional issues with handling planning restrictions in this way in the US. Basically, it seems the US ended up with rigid zoning restrictions because it's impossible to have the finer-grained restrictions that other countries do.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    > you still need planning permission to change a property from residential to commercial or industrial use, or to change it between different classifications of each of those uses. I'm not saying other countries don't have forms of zoning (japan, the subject of the article, certainly does) I'm saying few to no countries have as exclusive and tight zoning as the US.
pessimizer 10y ago
I'm not sure what people are getting out of this post. It's made up entirely of quotes from a very good blogpost [https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html] about Japanese zoning (that was also posted here years ago) wrapped in completely unsupported declarations of that system's superiority, followed with some odious racial conspiracy theories in the comments, which are dominated by a pretty well-known white supremacist. This link isn't value added over the original post, it's value subtracted.
- blueline 10y ago
  I was surprised to see my neighborhood mentioned as an example that racial discrimination in housing is a good thing not surprising to hear that person is a white supremacist
smcl 10y ago
"…[The] great rigidity in allowed uses per zone in North American zoning means that urban planing departments must really micromanage to the smallest detail everything to have a decent city. Because if they forget to zone for enough commercial zones or schools, people can’t simply build what is lacking, they’d need to change the zoning, and therefore confront the NIMBYs" Oh my word - when playing the SimCity series as a kid I always thought "well, this is a kinda weird way to work but I guess it's just a game..." when laying out the little squares of green, blue or yellow (SC2K colors iirc, can't remember the others!). I had no idea that this was a relatively accurate abstraction for real-life city planning in the USA.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Whereas in games like Pharaoh, they were designed so that you had to have many things within a certain (close, but not too close) distance of your population in order for your people to be happy and avoid crime, fires, etc. Zoning is non-existent. This is much closer to how planning permission works in my country - there's no specific zoning (though you're unlikely to get planning permission to put an industrial estate in a city centre), and people enjoy having shops etc nearby.
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    Yep, Japan is much more like Pharaoh than Sim City. If is probably my favorite aspect of living here. Living on the periphery of Tokyo we pay 900$/m for a 2.5 room and have more train stations, restaurants, shops, hospitals and parks nearby than any other residential place I've seen outside of Japan.
ubernostrum 10y ago
Which one is the zone for people descended from feudal-era outcast groups? Which one is the zone for people descended from survivors of the atomic bombings?
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  (by way of explanation, both of those groups are subjected to heavy discrimination in Japan, in a similar way to black people in the US -- any description of zoning which doesn't include socially-implicit "zones" like these is inadequate)
Animats 10y ago
Japan's zoning system was modified when, in 1985, there was a crackdown on love hotels. Revolving beds, mirrors larger than 1 square meter, vending machines selling sexually exciting products, hallways which lead directly from a private parking space to a room, lack of a restaurant, or lobbies less than 30 square meters make it a love hotel. Love hotels are subject to additional zoning restrictions. Amusingly, one effect was that love hotels put in restaurants to comply, and, to the surprise of management, their unashamed customers starting ordering meals. So more regular hotels put in rooms with sexy features, and love hotels started getting guests who just wanted a place to sleep. The distinction between the two has gradually disappeared.
- billmalarky 10y ago
  When I stayed in Japan for a few weeks last year I stayed in a love hotel for a few nights. It was the best deal around Kyoto by far, and I was blown away with the amenities. It felt more like a luxury hotel than seedy. One funny aspect is when you order room service, they give it to you via a little privacy sliding door. I assume so couples can order food after having already "slipped into something more comfortable."
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    Could you leave your room freely? AFAIK that's the only disadvantage of love hotels compared to hotels.
    - sdrothrock 10y ago
      I've never been to one where you couldn't.
      - rangibaby 10y ago
        Wow! In what areas? At the ones I have stayed in you get locked in until you check out.
        10y ago
arciini 10y ago
The blog that this article references, Urban Kchoze, is the best collection of urban policy analysis I've ever found. The author uses great diagrams and examples to really effectively illustrate his points. Here are a few really good articles: - Why we should tax property by street frontage: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/07/city-taxes-as-urban-growth-policies.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/07/city-taxes-as-urban-g... - Advantages of one-way streets: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-case-of-one-way-streets.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-case-of-one-way-s... - Impacts of commercial density: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2015/11/commercial-or-residential-density-which.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2015/11/commercial-or-residen... Strongly recommend it! It's my favourite urbanism blog, although there aren't usually that many posts thanks to the long length and high quality

187 points by Osiris30 10y ago

atemerev 10y ago

SimCity is to blame. It cemented the current system. :)

acbabis 10y ago
I don't know why this was downvoted so much. This is actually a pretty clever summary of the article. Have an upvote.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Cyph0n 10y ago

I read the original article when it was posted to HN a while back. It's a bit too detailed, but provides a very comprehensive analysis of why the Japanese system just works.

saosebastiao 10y ago

I'm glad Tyler is talking about this, as he tends to be the leading edge of a lot of policy discussion around newish ideas, and the Japanese zoning system is a marvel of both efficacy and simplicity. While the Japanese system is implemented and managed on the national level, I can imagine this being more effective on a more granular level, while still being much higher up than the city level as to avoid the political repercussions of local special interest landowners.

pauldino 10y ago
Tyler may have talked about this elsewhere, but this post was written by Alex Tabarrok.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
I'd guess the state level is natural -- but then again some states in the US (and all states in Australia) are dominated by one big city, so the state government can also be captured by NIMBYs. Generally I dislike the way top-level governments are becoming the only game in town. But the point is to have multiple levels of government checking each other. When it comes to zoning: its the locals who are the "bad" guys.
- twelvechairs 10y ago
  The problem is local governments are awful at planning for growth, especially in nice areas (where people actually want to live) as they tend towards no change. I think the best solution is still planning at a local level but there should be approppriate rules from a higher level to ensure it works - usually including a growth target which must be planned for and minimum densities (allowing for some exceptions) for different kidnds of locations (greenfield, around train stations, etc) On your other point - in my experience states tend towards the opposite - being developer lobby driven much more than nimby

codyb 10y ago

Very neat. I love reading about cities and urban planning. I have "The Death and Life of American Cities" by Jane Jacobs laying around which I need to read and I read another book about architecture here in New York City and how it has evolved over time in response to things such as fires and 9/11. Really really very interesting stuff. This was a great post. Mixed use cities are generally much more desirable in my eyes. The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system. Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens who live and have lived in a nation with huge amounts of racial segregation. The idea of a set of national guidelines makes sense from an engineering perspective because small towns can't afford engineers often (or may not even think to seek out their expertise) and in the end you have a group of individuals with no qualifications determining the fate of their town with arbitrarily decided rules. And rating things by their nuisance (traffic plus noise) levels is a really neat way to quantify whether a building should exist in a given area. Awesome! Lots of new things to entertain the mind.

wott 10y ago
> The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system. Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens. Unfortunately the same system was later exported to other countries and adopted by their citizens, although these countries did not have the same 'free' space. As a consequence the drawbacks of the system are even more perceptible (and the individual benefits are lesser) in these places.
- spraak 10y ago
  E.g. where? I'm curious
michaelbuddy 10y ago

contingencies 10y ago

It's not untrue to say that Japanese society as a whole does have a culture of Confucian orthodoxy/heirarchy, ie. people do not 'rock the boat' or 'aggressively agitate for change'. This means that tradition survives well and a cultural premium on internalizing discontent and preserving outward peace rules the land. Urban zoning is probably one of the areas most affected by this cultural property. That said, in my mind even traditional Japanese urban architecture is pretty well optimized for high density, itself largely based on Tang Dynasty Chang'an in China, arguably one of the greatest periods of multicultural tolerance and philosophical debate in the history of the planet (terminus of the Silk Road, vast exchange of ideas).

twblalock 10y ago
I'm not sure where to begin with this essentialist exaggeration. First of all, the history of Japanese agitation for change, especially in Tokyo, has been notable. Consider the massive protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s over security and labor unoin issues, and the protests against the establishment of Narita airport in the 1970s. Consider also Goto Shinpei's ambitious rebuilding of Tokyo, which had been destroyed in the 1923 Kanto earthquake, with a roads, parks, and a transit system inspired by the great cities of Europe and the US, not by Japanese tradition. Japan's current zoning system is a recent innovation, borne of the necessity of spurring growth during their long recession. The system it replaced was developed during the 20th century. You would have to look back before the late 19th century to find more traditional systems. This, along with the history of protest movements and the radical redesign of Tokyo in the 1920s, disproves the idea that Confucian orthodoxy and survival of tradition have much to do with Japan's zoning system. Furthermore, traditional Japanese urban buildings are not a whole lot like traditional Chinese urban buildings in their exterior appearance nor their interior layout.
- contingencies 10y ago
  Not sure why you label generalisation essentialism? Your opinion appears biased in terms of: (a) 20th century; (b) Tokyo. IMHO, rebuilding can hardly be classed as agitating for change against tradition. Furthermore, while protest movements have of course existed I would argue that they are few and relatively late to develop (massive discontent precedes) relative to other societies. It is a fact that many of Japan's oldest buildings are direct derivations of Tang Dynasty architecture, and in some cases (Kyoto) city layouts (urban plans) were directly copied from China.

irq11 10y ago

Japan's property values haven't risen in the last 20 years because their economy is in the toilet, they're struggling with deflation, and their population is declining. When the economy was growing like crazy in the 80s, Japan had the most expensive real estate on the planet, and the same zoning they do now.

ceras 10y ago
> When the economy was growing like crazy in the 80s, Japan had the most expensive real estate on the planet, and the same zoning they do now. Are you sure? From Financial Times[1]: > During the 1980s Japan had a spectacular speculative house price bubble that was even worse than in London and New York during the same period, and various Japanese economists were decrying the planning and zoning systems as having been a major contributor by reducing supply,” says André Sorensen, a geography professor at the University of Toronto, who has written extensively on planning in Japan. ... > "To help the economy recover from the bubble, the country eased regulation on urban development," says Ichikawa. "If it hadn’t been for the bubble, Tokyo would be in the same situation as London or San Francisco." [1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c... * * * Edited to add: To your first point, if you restrict your consideration of Japan to Tokyo, you see the largest metropolis in the world with a growing population -- other cities in Japan are shrinking, but Tokyo is growing, yet Tokyo prices are steady. I'm not sure about its economic situation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Tokyo's economy was stronger than other parts of Japan. Regardless, it's important information that Tokyo alone is building more housing than the entirety of California (source: same FT article).
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  It's really difficult I imagine to attribute either planning laws or declining population and a poor economy as being exclusively the cause. Very interesting article none the less! I find it a strange effect of the London housing market that it benefits property developers to under deliver in house building as the supply and demand situation will, even with brexit, mean increasing house prices. What can be done to get the incentives right?

nxc18 10y ago

If this is an interesting topic, check out the book, Seeing Like a State. It has really great coverage of the history of things like urban planning, naming of people, mapping, etc. The standout thesis of the book is that from a birds-eye-view perspective (what the state sees), cities that were designed to meet the local needs of people look chaotic, but the ideal clean order from that perspective ignores needs of people. For example, a neighborhood with just houses connected by a highway to a commercial district looks clean and organized on a map. Only with boots on the ground do you see what a disaster that is compared to the model of having neighborhoods and boroughs with all of the community resources (housing, work, food, shopping, parks, schools, etc.) they need.

snaky 10y ago
> Alex Tabarrok discusses the case of India’s private city, and the challenges — and promise — of a private model of urbanization. http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-371-private-cities/ http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-371-private-cities/
gedy 10y ago
> The standout thesis of the book is that from a birds-eye-view perspective (what the state sees), cities that were designed to meet the local needs of people look chaotic That sounds exactly like big gov't promoters, and trying to solving things at the federal level.

masklinn 10y ago

> in the US zones tend to be exclusive but in Japan the zones limit the maximum nuisance in a zone It's not just japan, I'm not sure the US-style exclusive euclidian zoning is practiced anywhere else, if only for historical reasons: in most countries cities grew organically and mixed-use.

stretchwithme 10y ago
Probably very impractical arrangements can only survive when most people have the resources to compensate. In a country with few resources, it never even gets off the ground. And if it ever did, that could have been hundreds of years ago, longer than the US has to learn what works. When we are young, we can do many impractical things. But if we make it to being old, its likely we've let a lot of those things go. So too with cities.
makomk 10y ago
The UK is mixed-use pretty much everywhere, but you still need planning permission to change a property from residential to commercial or industrial use, or to change it between different classifications of each of those uses. From what I can tell there are legal and possibly even constitutional issues with handling planning restrictions in this way in the US. Basically, it seems the US ended up with rigid zoning restrictions because it's impossible to have the finer-grained restrictions that other countries do.
- masklinn 10y ago
  > you still need planning permission to change a property from residential to commercial or industrial use, or to change it between different classifications of each of those uses. I'm not saying other countries don't have forms of zoning (japan, the subject of the article, certainly does) I'm saying few to no countries have as exclusive and tight zoning as the US.

pessimizer 10y ago

I'm not sure what people are getting out of this post. It's made up entirely of quotes from a very good blogpost [https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html] about Japanese zoning (that was also posted here years ago) wrapped in completely unsupported declarations of that system's superiority, followed with some odious racial conspiracy theories in the comments, which are dominated by a pretty well-known white supremacist. This link isn't value added over the original post, it's value subtracted.

blueline 10y ago
I was surprised to see my neighborhood mentioned as an example that racial discrimination in housing is a good thing not surprising to hear that person is a white supremacist

smcl 10y ago

"…[The] great rigidity in allowed uses per zone in North American zoning means that urban planing departments must really micromanage to the smallest detail everything to have a decent city. Because if they forget to zone for enough commercial zones or schools, people can’t simply build what is lacking, they’d need to change the zoning, and therefore confront the NIMBYs" Oh my word - when playing the SimCity series as a kid I always thought "well, this is a kinda weird way to work but I guess it's just a game..." when laying out the little squares of green, blue or yellow (SC2K colors iirc, can't remember the others!). I had no idea that this was a relatively accurate abstraction for real-life city planning in the USA.

vertex-four 10y ago
Whereas in games like Pharaoh, they were designed so that you had to have many things within a certain (close, but not too close) distance of your population in order for your people to be happy and avoid crime, fires, etc. Zoning is non-existent. This is much closer to how planning permission works in my country - there's no specific zoning (though you're unlikely to get planning permission to put an industrial estate in a city centre), and people enjoy having shops etc nearby.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Yep, Japan is much more like Pharaoh than Sim City. If is probably my favorite aspect of living here. Living on the periphery of Tokyo we pay 900$/m for a 2.5 room and have more train stations, restaurants, shops, hospitals and parks nearby than any other residential place I've seen outside of Japan.

ubernostrum 10y ago

Which one is the zone for people descended from feudal-era outcast groups? Which one is the zone for people descended from survivors of the atomic bombings?

ubernostrum 10y ago
(by way of explanation, both of those groups are subjected to heavy discrimination in Japan, in a similar way to black people in the US -- any description of zoning which doesn't include socially-implicit "zones" like these is inadequate)

Animats 10y ago

Japan's zoning system was modified when, in 1985, there was a crackdown on love hotels. Revolving beds, mirrors larger than 1 square meter, vending machines selling sexually exciting products, hallways which lead directly from a private parking space to a room, lack of a restaurant, or lobbies less than 30 square meters make it a love hotel. Love hotels are subject to additional zoning restrictions. Amusingly, one effect was that love hotels put in restaurants to comply, and, to the surprise of management, their unashamed customers starting ordering meals. So more regular hotels put in rooms with sexy features, and love hotels started getting guests who just wanted a place to sleep. The distinction between the two has gradually disappeared.

billmalarky 10y ago
When I stayed in Japan for a few weeks last year I stayed in a love hotel for a few nights. It was the best deal around Kyoto by far, and I was blown away with the amenities. It felt more like a luxury hotel than seedy. One funny aspect is when you order room service, they give it to you via a little privacy sliding door. I assume so couples can order food after having already "slipped into something more comfortable."
- rangibaby 10y ago
  Could you leave your room freely? AFAIK that's the only disadvantage of love hotels compared to hotels.
  - sdrothrock 10y ago
    I've never been to one where you couldn't.
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      Wow! In what areas? At the ones I have stayed in you get locked in until you check out.
      - 10y ago

arciini 10y ago

The blog that this article references, Urban Kchoze, is the best collection of urban policy analysis I've ever found. The author uses great diagrams and examples to really effectively illustrate his points. Here are a few really good articles: - Why we should tax property by street frontage: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/07/city-taxes-as-urban-growth-policies.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/07/city-taxes-as-urban-g... - Advantages of one-way streets: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-case-of-one-way-streets.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2016/03/the-case-of-one-way-s... - Impacts of commercial density: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2015/11/commercial-or-residential-density-which.html http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2015/11/commercial-or-residen... Strongly recommend it! It's my favourite urbanism blog, although there aren't usually that many posts thanks to the long length and high quality