Street formation in Tokyo
What is characteristic about Tokyo’s city formation is that the streets and zoning reflect the terrestrial form to a great extent.
Most of large streets are built to go along the ridges of valleys. With these streets, the city is naturally divided into small areas according to its land form.
Tokyo is a city of slopes. Basically every single slopes has its own name. That is very different to San Francisco, which is also known to have a great number of slopes. In San Francisco the city is basically formed in grids and streets are not relevant to its land form. They’re just going from north to south or from east to west.
While in Tokyo, where the city form precisely reflects the terrestrial form, people used to be more conscious about where they are, in a valley or a highland. You can see this in the fact that many names of places in Tokyo have letters that represent their relationship to the surroundings, e.g ya/tani – valley, yama – mountain, ue – up, shita – down, etc. Thus in this city, slopes have their own meanings to connect different areas with different characters.
Older cities and districts, for example Lisbon, the city of seven hills have similar foundation as Tokyo. But I still feel Tokyo is unique because of it’s scale(Tokyo was already bigger than London in 18th century!) and failure in fundamental re-sturucturing efforts that have been appeared and dissapeared through the 19th and 20th century. Some patches are done but an Haussmann’s renovation never occurred in this city.
The basic structure of the city has gradually evolved through the Edo period.
Residences of high-classed warriors(Samurai), temples and shrines took large areas in the higher grounds surfacing to the large streets going through the hills. Not so large houses of lower samurai followed, then much smaller houses of ordinal city dwellers formed small grids. The streets were shaped rather naturally and incrementally as the city grew.
In the Yamanote area (area around and west from the imperial palace), you can see this complex structure of the city. In the Shitamachi area, especially in the area east to the Sumida river, houses are in more larger and organized grids because the area is basically flat and developed at a rather later stage in the Edo period. But even in Shitamachi, the city has a lack of ground structure. The land is divided into small districts by water, natural and artificial, and each has its own scale of grid.
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