Displaced Tokyo

The phenomenon of urbanization has become, in the past decades, a major issue in the global economy. Huge masses of people have been moving at a high rate to the urbanized areas. Cities, in order to satisfy the demand for spaces, are in constant evolution and expansion. This phenomenon demands architects and urban planners great caution and understanding of it. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the condition of modern metropolises, by taking as test subject the city of Tokyo, probably Today’s biggest and most advanced urban agglomerate in the World. The work hereby proposed, is an investigation on a specific thematic that affects most of the urban territories: the relation between spaces and their uses. In this research, Photography has been used as added investigative device. In particular, the thesis is focused on the distinction between the designed use of a space, meaning the use expected by architects and planners, and the actual use of it, meaning the use that people, living the city, do of it. Tokyo represents, in this sense, an extremely interesting case study for different reasons: first, the contradiction between the absence of an urban plan, as the city grows like an organism, spontaneously, and the design of specific spaces of the city, extremely normed and defined, not leaving any space to spontaneity in their use. Second, the absence of public spaces as Western culture defines them, due to an extremely privatized society, as Japanese society is. The structure of the work is based on two distinct moments of it: a theoretical part, with both an objective description of the city and a subjective one, based on the months I spent living there; and the photographic corpus. The photographic research is structured into five ‘chapters’; each chapter represents a dimension of the city, meaning a peculiar characteristic that can be recognized in most of the big cities of the World. It is an experiment of re-construction of the image of a personal city, a reflection of the idea that in order to survive in such a metropolitan jungle, the inhabitants have to build their own cities in the city, with spaces they specifically design, even though not physically, for themselves, according to their needs and will, cutting them out from the material city.