ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of planning the metropolitan growth in Tokyo after the end of the Second World War, centered at Kenzō Tange’s Plan for Tokyo 1960. It reveals many attempts that predated Tange’s plan to reorganize and regulate Tokyo’s rapid expansion but with few successes. Proposals had come from governmental agencies, industrialists, as well as visionary architects like Metabolists. In contrast to the official plans such as the 1958 National Capital Region Development Plan that tried to contain growth in the city center and direct growth to remote peripheries with satellite towns, new ideas focused on the Tokyo Bay as promising “land” for urbanization. Tange experimented the concept of a marine city in the theoretical project for Boston Bay, formulated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and presented to the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne meeting at Otterlo in 1959. He then synthesized these influences into the comprehensive Tokyo Bay project, designed for the world’s first “megacity” of ten million residents. This plan emphasized the tertiary sector of an emerging “pivotal city,” mobility as its key character, a linear axis as both an instrument for greater mobility and a cultural symbol for an “open society,” and a flexible urban system for such a city’s continuing growth like an organism. Tange’s bold concept became enormously influential, heralding large-scale developments on Tokyo Bay in the following decades, but also drew criticisms for its rigid megastructural form and political utopianism.
