ABSTRACT
Although the capital of the world’s most advanced economy, Tokyo shares many of the problems of rapid urbanisation in the third world – problems of rapid population growth, with infrastructure provision lagging far behind. Located at the centre of the Japanese archipelago, the Tokyo metropolis lies in the Southern Kanto area and is a city of extreme density. As many as one-tenth of the nation’s population live there on less than 1 per cent of its land area. The city is highly monocentric, with an unusually high concentration of employment in the central area: of the 8.3 million jobs in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) area in 1990, 6.7 million were situated there (Map 3.1). With this concentration comes a huge dependence on commuting into an area which houses the great majority of Japan’s largest company headquarters and a huge majority of foreign company offices.
