Holy fuck. I knew Tokyo was huge but I had no idea it was that huge with that density. I can't even wrap my head around that. Imagine all the unseen people within this image.
Roughly 37 million people live in the greater Tokyo metro area, in an area still larger than some countries
It's so big that one trip I did just inside of Tokyo was about an hour train ride west and I still hadn't left the dense urban part of the city.
Also a lot of people in the surrounding areas just call it Tokyo even if it isn't, like Chiba and Kawasaki.
Have you visited? I've been a few times I'm always overwhelmed by simply how much humanity exists there. Bars on top of bars on top of cafes on top of residential towers with hundreds of people inside. Everything's a little story and yet it exists in this huge blanket of excessive consumerism. It's like the whole city is screaming at you simultaneously to buy a million trinkets and also to feel some kind of ambient cooperation. Don't know how to describe it.
Pictures like this make your own hometown feel like a tiny little hamlet by comparison
The Tokyo area is still mostly single family homes and often two storey apartments. You can see some mansion type larger towers but they have expensive fees, and sometimes there are public housing blocks.
it would be dope to see a colour coated version for what % is housing/business etc...
Japan is huge on mixed zoning so I guess it'll look like a drip painting.
Looks horrible.
How can people think Soviet-style brutalist public housing is bad but somehow think this is better?
Eh, it's not that bad. The colors are kind of washed out in the photo, but there's a ton of green, big parks and stuff. Plus, Tokyo actually has good public transport.
It's not great, but it's defnitely far from the worst excesses of urban planning and sprawl you can see in the US
Yeah definitely less bad than whatever the fuck the US is doing but this will never not be just a huge waste of natural resources.
The thing you have to understand with Japan is that their entire country is mountains with like 3 or 4 actually flat spaces in the whole thing. Those flat spaces are basically all like this, they are the only spaces that can be developed at all and they are this way out of necessity. They have weird geography.
I would think that this level of density is more efficient because all the people are in one spot, no? You only have to bring the resources to one place. All the people that live there would still be living somewhere if the city wasn't like that, but the distribution of resources would require much greater efforts.
Are there not many? I'm not that familiar with how Tokyo is designed, it's hard to tell from the photo. They're definitely fucking up if they're not using the space to build dense housing for sure.
If Tokyo was mostly single family homes it’d be even more impossibly gigantic
Edit - someone else here is saying it actually is; that’s wack
there are plenty of apartment buildings, this photo's extreme altitude flattens everything
I like how visible Shinjuku is over on the left there. Also I can see Yoyogi park, I've been there a couple of times. Last time I was in Tokyo I went to a bunch of noise music shows. There's a really good scene of small musicians who play to crowds of less than 10 people in these packed little bars. It's an overwhelming place to visit if you grew up in the sticks like me, but it's got a robust train system. Plus you can get to Osaka from Tokyo in like 3 hours.
looks alright just gotta knock out a bit of single family housing
