It's pretty depressing that Tokyo is kinda the high point of urbanism and even it has so many issues. The bar is set really low for nice cities Tokyo has many

It's pretty depressing that Tokyo is kinda the high point of urbanism and even it has so many issues. The bar is set really low for nice cities Tokyo has many city centers, but I think it fails pretty badly when it comes to office space distribution. There's still concentration of large companies in a couple central areas, meaning everyone is going into a couple spots every morning, and leaving every evening. There's a big status thing involved where companies want to be in the good neighborhoods so their address tells people that the company's successful. It means that huge swaths of the city are empty during the day. This compounds into lack of as good public services in certain areas, basically creating dreadful suburb communities where there's nothing but housing and convenience stores for miles, and local businesses can't survive on the paltry foot traffic Meanwhile everyone and their dog is in the same 5 neighborhoods Tokyo is lucky in that there's permissive zoning, so theoretically this can be corrected. But there's almost no incentive to do so because there's still a lot of prime construction to be had in other parts of the city The city is going to end up with a bunch of holes in its urban planning because theres not much glory in developing the less popular places The dark side of the transit network being in place is that there's not as much incentive to ensure local growth. So everything is a 40 minute train ride away. (To a greater extent the Shinkansen did this for neighboring cities. You can now get to Tokyo in an hour, so there is less pressure to have stuff in your town. People end up getting used to it and moving to Tokyo)