Paper presented to Walk21-V Cities for People, The Fifth International Conference on Walking in the 21 st Century, June 9-11 2004, Copenhagen, Denmark www.citiesforpeople.dk; www.walk21.com Designing a place for people s public life: small trials in two Japanese cities Toshio Kitahara Professor Department of Urban Environment Systems Faculty of Engineering Chiba University, Japan Contact details: Toshio Kitahara Department of Urban Environment Systems Faculty of Engineering, Chiba University 1-33 Yayoi-cho, Chiba, 263-8522 JAPAN E-mail: kitahara@faculty.chiba-u.jp Abstract Promoting good use of public spaces is one of the most effective ways to give rise to the positive public life that vitalizes a city socially as well as economically. In the old days in Japan, public spaces in a city had been utilized in various ways. A number of pictures in the early 19th century show us vivid outdoor life of people everywhere in a city. There were many people enjoying places and a lot of temporary furniture such as wood benches, tea stalls and vendor s booths, which supported people s activity. But modern planning has been gradually eliminating them from public spaces. Above all, motorization in the later 20th century took streets and other public spaces away from people. For the last few decades, some planners and designers have struggled to improve the quality of the city experience. It was one of their efforts to take public spaces back to people. We have made two trials on life demonstration in the last decade: first at Nagoya in 1997 and second at Chiba since 2000. At Nagoya, we collaborated with Jan Gehl and his students of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in producing an outdoor café and a stalls bazaar. And at Chiba, we planned and managed an annual event of an outdoor café and a parasol gallery. These trials illustrated that small and soft design of public spaces with temporary setting could effectively promote positive use and then stimulate vivid life in public spaces. My paper gives a simple perspective of the use and condition of public spaces in the Japanese city, and then discusses how to bring back life in public spaces following our trials.
Biography Toshio Kitahara Dr. Eng., City planning and design course of University of Tokyo, Japan, 1977. Professor of Urban Environment Design at Chiba University, Japan, 1990-. Visiting professor: Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, 1998; University of Veracuruz, Mexico, 2001; University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2003; et al. Author of Conserving the Walkable Environment in the Neighbourhood: A Case Study of the Improvement Effort in Kyojima, Japan, Australia: Walking the 21st Century, Perth, Western Australia, 2001.
Designing a place for people s public life: small trials in two Japanese cities Toshio Kitahara Professor Department of Urban Environment Systems Faculty of Engineering Chiba University, Japan Introduction Promoting good use of public spaces is one of the most effective ways to give rise to the positive public life that vitalizes a city socially as well as economically. In the old days in Japan, public spaces in a city had been utilized in various ways. A number of pictures in the early 19th century show us vivid outdoor life of people everywhere in a city. There were many people enjoying places and a lot of temporary furniture such as wood benches, tea stalls and vendor s booths, which supported people s activity. But modern planning has been gradually eliminating them from public spaces. Above all, motorization in the later 20th century took streets and other public spaces away from people. For the last few decades, some planners and designers have struggled to improve the quality of the city experience. It was one of their efforts to take public spaces back to people. We have made two trials on life demonstration in the last decade: first at Nagoya in 1997 and second at Chiba since 2000. At Nagoya, we collaborated with Jan Gehl and his students of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in producing an outdoor café and a stalls bazaar. And at Chiba, we planned and managed an annual event of an outdoor café and a parasol gallery. These trials illustrated that small and soft design of public spaces with temporary setting could effectively promote positive use and then stimulate vivid life in public spaces. In this paper, I give a simple perspective of the use and condition of public spaces in Japanese city, and then discuss how to bring back the life in public spaces following our trials. Promoting life in public spaces In Japan, the concept of urban design was first introduced in the early 1960s and practically implemented in the 1980s. Nagoya, the fourth biggest city in Japan, is one of the pioneer cities that actively carried out urban design projects in that period. Nagoya rose again like a phoenix from the ashes, after bombs in the World War II had heavily destroyed it. It was said that it showed an excellent example of post-war city planning. There was a well-ordered network of wide and straight streets. But cars exclusively used those streets. The city suffered from lack of amenity or lively public life. However, the municipal government has tried to break through this with the urban design.
Hirokoji Avenue is a main street connecting downtown Nagoya and its central station. It had a long history as the busiest street in the city since the later 17th century, but lost its vivid life in the early 1970s when its sidewalks were reduced for car traffic. In 1982, I worked for making an improvement plan for Hirokoji Avenue and proposed to re-widen its sidewalks. Though my proposal was simply neglected then, I made up the city s urban design plan with city staff and other planners in the later 1980s. And in the early 1990s, the government widened the sidewalks of Hirokoji Avenue and refined the pedestrian environment according to our urban design plan. The physical quality of the public space was remarkably improved. But, unfortunately, widened sidewalks were often underused. We had not yet learned well how to use and manage such an improved space. In 1997, I was designated as a coordinator of a session in the Nagoya International Urban Design Forum. My session was entitled Designing the Life in Public Spaces. It was difficult to discuss life in urban spaces satisfactorily in an indoor conference room. Then, my students and I made an experimental demonstration in downtown Nagoya, collaborating with Jan Gehl, a Danish urban designer who has long worked for humanizing public spaces and generating the life in those spaces, and his students. The Danish team built a wooden floor in a corner of an open space beside a downtown boulevard and opened a café with 32 chairs under 4 big parasols. They called it Copenhagen Plaza (Figure 1). Professor Gehl pointed out that there were many people on streets in Nagoya but they were merely walking from one point to another. A sidewalk café is an oasis on the street. Please sit down there, have a cup of coffee, relax for a while, and then the street will have a new life. So he said. Figure 1: Copenhagen Plaza at Nagoya, 1997 My team designed Breezy Bazaar, or an up-to-date version of Japanese traditional stalls market, right next to the Copenhagen Plaza (Figure 2). We installed steel-pipe stalls along both sides of a narrow linear space of 40 meters long, and dressed them with hundreds of wind-bells, pinwheels, compact discs, bamboo blinds, and so on. Breezy Bazaar was a device to visualize slight summer breeze as well as a stage for a comfortable and delightful life in the hot season.
Figure 2: Breezy Bazaar at Nagoya, 1997 Japanese context of public life In Japan, there was a strong tradition of public life in public spaces. Hirokoji Avenue at Nagoya was a broad street of 27 meters wide that had been widened in the later 17th century to prevent fire spreading. And it soon became a place for people s pleasure. A book in the early 19th century said that there were many huts of various attractions drawing in huge crowds. Those huts were temporary structures with thin timbers, reeds and straw mats. Also in Tokyo, most of the popular amusement centers grew up in firebreak open spaces. Ryogoku Hirokoji, the busiest place in the old days Tokyo, was originally such an open space at the foot of a main bridge where a great number of temporary huts of play houses, show booths, shooting galleries and cafés bustled with people, and numerous colorful flags and banners added to the gaily atmosphere. Japanese people have developed and enjoyed their outdoor life for a long time with temporary settings in public spaces. In World War II, more than two hundred Japanese cities were heavily bombed. It was a black market in the ruins that provided defeated people with daily necessities and momentary pleasures. Such a market was also an agglomeration of huts with half-burnt timbers and zinc sheets. It is not too much to say that this temporary market was one of the cradles of the miraculous restoration of postwar Japan. But postwar planning was fast eliminating people s life from public open spaces. The motorization in the later 20th century accelerated this trend. Traffic engineers claimed that the most important role of the street was to accept traffic flow and that staying and rambling of people was merely an obstacle to this function. Stalls and vendors, once so familiar everywhere in our cities, were swept away from streets and other public spaces. Lifeless space became a separator, though the old days public space used to be a stage of life connecting everything in the city. Our demonstration in Nagoya was an experimental effort to bring back life to public spaces with a small temporary setting. When public spaces are full of life again, the city will surely take a big step toward being a vibrant place for people.
Soft urban design for public life Chiba, my university s hometown, is a prefectural capital about 35 kilometers east of Tokyo. It is a rapidly growing city, with a population of about one million, which has tripled in the last forty years. Most of the newcomers flow out into Tokyo and suburban shopping centers. And its city center has lost customers and life, though its physical conditions have been improved. My students and I, collaborating with citizens and the city government, tried to open up a way to revitalize the desolated quarter. Then, we made a three-day experiment at the city center in November 2000, which included two kinds of life demonstration, namely, an outdoor café and a parasol gallery. They were intended to show how to use public spaces in order to bring back the life in the city. There is a square-like park of about 70 meters square, which occupies one block at the heart of the city center. Unfortunately, it is not well used in spite of its great name, the Central Park. There is little life on ordinary days. Then, we set there a timber-framed corridor of 30 meters long embellished with many flower baskets, and laid out an outdoor café with 23 tables and 95 chairs (Figure 3). A full-equipped kitchen was also installed in a big tent. It was the first case in Chiba, and even in the Tokyo area, of opening a true outdoor café in public spaces. Almost a thousand people enjoyed their first opportunity to sit, eat and drink in the open air in three days. Figure 3: Universal Café at Chiba, 2000 A location for our parasol gallery was the Central Promenade, a broad and rather short avenue of 50 meters wide and 500 meters long, connecting the Central Park to the central station. Its sidewalks had been widened to 10 meters in 1999 but were underused except in rush hours. Then, we arranged 25 parasols in two rows on the sidewalk, and provided spaces under them to citizen groups (Figure 4). White parasols of about two meters, lined up at rhythmical intervals, articulated and polished up the cityscape as an art installation. Fifteen groups displayed their own paintings and crafts, showed performance, and played music under the parasols. They drew about a thousand people every day and gave life to the street.
Figure 4: Parasol Gallery at Chiba, 2000 We have held those two events every year since 2000, and the period of the café in the Central Park has been getting longer and longer. It was 3 days in the first year, 16 days in the second year, 37 days in the third year and 6 months from April to October in 2003. And as for the parasol gallery, we doubled both the number of parasols and the length of their rows also in 2003. So a vibrant art corridor connected the park and the station. Our effort of small and soft urban design has gradually brought back life in the city. Conclusion In today s Japan, the commercial use of public spaces is strictly restricted. Authorities say that any private person should not make a profit from a public space because it is the public domain. On the other hand, most Western countries prepare rules to control and encourage the commercial use of public spaces. They seem to say that the public domain should be used and managed effectively. The latter is certainly a better system to give life to the city. So it is necessary for us to take back public spaces for public life, and it must be useful to remember that one of the essential characters of our tradition of outdoor life was the temporality. A temporary setting, such as an outdoor café, a parasol gallery or a stalls market, has a function of incubating life in public spaces. Most of cities have grown little by little for many years, in which temporary elements played important roles. Designers and planners were often devoted to grand and hard structures. But large structures suddenly inserted in an existing city tear down its fabric and cut off its life. We should notice again the importance of soft urban design as well as hard one. Our trials were efforts to set a step in the process of rebuilding a city for people where the physical environment and people s life would support and reinforce each other. And I would like to propose to design a small and soft setting instead of a grand and hard structure, when it is critical to bring back life into a desolated city. Such a setting will effectively develop a place where people will enjoy vivid public life and generate the driving force to revive the city socially as well as economically.
References 1. J. Gehl & L. Gemzoe (1996). Public Spaces Public Life. Copenhagen: The Danish Architectural Press. 2. K. Kato, T. Kitahara, et al. (2000). A Study on the Public Use System of Street Space in Europe and the United States, Journal of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Engineering, AIJ, No. 530. Tokyo, Japan. 3. T. Kitahara (1997). Designing the Life in Public Spaces, Proceedings of Nagoya International Urban Design Forum. Nagoya, Japan. 4. T. Kitahara (2001). Promoting the Life with a Temporary Setting, Academic Report of Kitakyushu Urban Association, Vol. 11. Kitakyushu, Japan. 5. T. Watanabe, T. Kitahara, et al. (2001). An Experiment of the Use of Public Space for Activating the City Center, Paper on City Planning, CPIJ, No. 36. Tokyo, Japan.