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This is a video on multiple plans to build cities on Tokyo's bay. 

This includes Kenzo Tange's famous 1960 plan.

This video would not have been possible without: 

Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist's book: Project Japan Metabolism talks.
Kenzo Tange Image CC 3.0 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kenzo_Tange_1981.jpg

Blender. 
Davinci Resolve.
Cavalry.

Images via Getty.

is its bay, and this is Kenzo Tange's plan for Tokyo.

a spine that doubled as a highway, connecting the world's largest city to the world's largest city built on water.

But Tange's radical plan was just 1 of many.

Multiple plans to transform Tokyo into a thing the world had never seen before.

Why did Kenzo and the others design these cities on water?

And why is this introduction so dramatic?

It's right after the Second World war and Tokyo is a mess.

Devastated cities, job seekers, and returning soldiers are pushing many Japanese towards the capital.

The city's population is growing and Tokyo's elites are restless, desperate for any answer to the problem of too little homes but too many people.

They consider building satellite cities but there's a problem.

Just because you build new places there's no guarantee that people will move to them.

Haisakura Kano is the chairman of the Japanese Housing Corporation.

Instead of expanding Tokyo further into land, he suggests they create it.

The city shouldn't bother with building new buildings on its boundaries, but

they should build them next to its heart.

13 years before, the Americans used nuclear weapons to destroy 2 Japanese cities.

He suggests blowing up a mountain with atomic bombs.

That way they could gather enough land to fill in two-thirds of the entire bay, creating a 1,500 square kilometer plot that they could build upon.

This is the first plan for the Tokyo Bay.

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Surrounding the bay are 4 prefectures, the Tokyo City, Saitama, Kanagawa, and Chiba.

In the future, he'd become the prefecture's governor.

Chiba never really had the pull of Tokyo City,

but by building land between them, Kano could change that.

He suggests constructing a new international airport at Futsu, connecting the outside world to a small Chiban fishing village.

Right next to his new airport, he plans a massive residential belt crossing the entire bay.

On the east, a massive industrial zone with 24 zones.

And on the west, more industrial zones, which are separated from the residential belt by 2 long strips of forest.

The west side is purposely dug 20 meters deep so that 100,000 ton tankers can dock.

And finally, slicing the entire bay perpendicularly is a 20 meter deep canal connecting Haida with the port of Chiba.

the minds of Tokyo's desperate elites to the idea of building on the bay.

But his breakthrough plan wasn't perfect.

Filling in two-thirds of the bay with land is not cheap, even if you do blow up a mountain.

So instead, his plan gets picked up by the head of the Council for Industrial Planning, Matsunaga.

Instead of massive chunks of land, the bay is now filled with islands.

More detailed than Kano's first plan, the Neo-Tokyo plan has 8 distinct zones.

Commercial, industrial, residential, recreation, and 2 airports instead of 1.

The last 3 zones specifically describe ground transportation.

The largest being a super expressway that surrounds the entire bay and also crosses it.

The smallest 1 being a smaller expressway encircling the bay within.

And the last being a super rapid railway that hugs the super expressway and connects the new islands with prefectures outside of the Tokyo metropolitan area.

In the Neo Tokyo plan, there's still an airport by Futsu, but now there's also another international airport planned for the center of the bay.

The Neo-Tokyo plan is detailed, but like Kano's plan before it, the Neo-Tokyo plan didn't come without its critics.

Critics who also had ideas for what needed to happen to the bay.

In the 1960s, a group of Japanese architects introduced a new architectural philosophy.

We hope to create something which, even in destruction, will cause subsequent new creation.

the form of the cities we were going to make.

Cities constantly undergoing the process of metabolism." I didn't really understand any of that either.

For these 5 kind of pretentious architects, cities were not concrete rigid and flexible structures.

Buildings were cells of a much larger, constantly changing system that could easily be changed and destroyed while the form remained the same.

Roads were like nerves in a much larger nervous system.

Different functions of the city acted like organs.

These metabolists conjured up radically new ideas for architecture, Dreaming up ideas for cities that looked like giant animals.

Buildings that were as much part of the sky as the land.

An architecture designed to grow, contracting and expanding with time.

The Metabolists were ambitious, And they had ideas for what needed to happen to the bay.

The first of the metabolists to go against the Neo-Tokyo plan is Otaka.

Instead of moving tons of soil, and still requiring foundations, Otaka believed that the bay should

Instead of moving tons of soil, they only need to build a bunch of small mini islands.

According to Otaka, but probably not to any structural engineer, the pillars with some occasional use of land would be much less expensive than filling the entire bay.

For zoning, Otaka designed it so that the industrial areas face the opening side of the bay.

The residential housing would be placed on

an outer belt, which was then sliced by commercial zones.

For transportation, there would be an interlooped highway and railway.

Like Kano's plan before it, Otaka's industrial belt is also purposely dug 20 meters deep for docking.

Otaka was 1 of the few metabolists to actually be taken seriously.

The plans that came after him were a much harder pill to swallow.

Kurokawa was a young 25-year-old architect who presented 2 separate plans for the bay.

For his first, he suggested converting the city into a giant organism that reached into the bay.

The city would be built with 2 metaphorical hands, 1 for international communication and the other for domestic.

It would have a head serving as the central axis, an entrance to the capital.

Crossing his city diagonally are 2 other separate axes, dotted with 2 buildings he had designed.

The buildings were intended to hold entire villages, the bamboo housing community, and the plant housing community.

For a second plan, Kurokawa would be even more ambitious.

Called the Ocean City, He proposed building helix land units that could be connected on top by a giant highway.

These helixes would connect to form much larger cells, which were then connected by more highways, forming a nervous system that could expand organically like a slime mold.

Parts of the cell could then be taken away, and then the form would still remain, slowly retracting and contracting into the Tokyo Bay.

Both of Kurokawa's plans were considered unrealistic, but even he was not the most radical of the metabolists.

Kikutake was obsessed with building megastructures and leaving the ground.

He dreamed up ideas of tightly packing floating hexagons to build cities on top of, expandable chains of floating balls, and drifting cylinder cities with buildings that served as buoys.

Kikutake's plan for the Tokyo Bay was 1 of the most ambitious but also 1 of the most obscure.

It was the most visually limited of all the plans that were presented, but also the largest.

He created 3 separate boroughs, a borough by Kyoto to protect against flooding, another by Harumi, and the most staggering, a grid that stretched across the entire bay.

All 3 boroughs were connected by a gigantic loop highway, and the biggest grid in the middle of the bay would contain floating housing and factories that linked together with the grid road system.

When certain elements of the city became redundant, they could be released off of the megastructure and be sunk.

All of these plans made by the metabolists had some common features.

They were large, they were designed to maintain an overall shape even if certain pieces were removed, and they were all connected by extensive roadways.

If you look far enough, you could also catch a glimpse of something alive.

But another thing that binded the Metabolists was their teacher and leader, Kenzo Tange, the man who designed the most extensive plan for the Tokyo Bay, and who came pretty damn close to actually being successful.

Tange was the blend between all 4 plans for the Bay.

He had the political will and savviness of Kano.

He made his plan public and mobilized media to get his ideas into the minds of citizens and actual politicians.

Like Kurokawa, he imagined a structure that was built on a giant spine, but which also grew over time from the mainland city.

Like Higutake, he fetishized the idea of a massive megastructure.

And like Otaka, he also wanted to build on pillars.

This is Kenzo Tanke's plan for the Tokyo Bay, a linear city that builds off of a massive looping spine.

His city would house 10 million people and like Kano's plan before it, connect the Tokyo City with Chiba on the other side of the bay.

Each vertebrae is a 9km long unit, which consists of 3 decks of looping highways.

Perpendicular to the major spine, roads would connect to A-frame megastructures, a 138m tall megastructure that had its own artificial ground.

Within the spine are zones for government buildings, offices, shopping, hotels, recreation, a new central station, and a new harbor.

The buildings within the spine are also constructed on pillars so that they can hover above the ground.

Like Kurokawa, Tange believed in creating a system that could procedurally grow over time.

As opposed to radial growth, Tange advocated for linear growth inspired by the development of the spines in mammals.

He also believed that the future of cities revolved around the car, so his plan was made highly dependent on

Kenzo was responding to a world that was undergoing rapid development,

an idea to control and organize a society that was growing rapidly.

But for all the effort that was put in Kenzo's plan

and the others, none actually became a reality.

They were too large, too intimidating, and too much of a risk.

years, the city has climbed into the bay slowly from all sides, but just with no utopian grand plan in sight.

There may not be a linear city built on water, but today more than 15% of the Tokyo Bay has been reclaimed.

And even in 2022, there are still dreams to build on the bay.


Speaker 0: This is Tokyo, the capital of Japan. This

Speaker 1: is its bay, and this is Kenzo Tange's plan for Tokyo. A massive floating metropolis with

Speaker 0: a spine that doubled as a highway, connecting the world's largest city to the world's largest city built on water. But Tange's radical plan was just 1 of many.

Speaker 1: Multiple plans to transform Tokyo into a thing the world had never seen before. So why?

Speaker 0: Why did Kenzo and the others design these cities on water? Why do they look the way they do? And why is this introduction so dramatic? Seriously, why?

Speaker 1: It's right after the Second World war and Tokyo is a mess. Devastated cities, job seekers, and returning soldiers are pushing many Japanese towards the capital. The city's population is growing and Tokyo's elites are restless, desperate for any answer to the problem of too little homes but too many people. They consider building satellite cities but there's a problem. People are hard to predict.

Just because you build new places there's no guarantee that people will move to them. They need a different answer.

Speaker 0: And so 1 day a man gives it

Speaker 1: to them. Haisakura Kano is the chairman of the Japanese Housing Corporation. Instead of expanding Tokyo further into land, he suggests they create it.

Speaker 0: The city shouldn't bother with building new buildings on its boundaries, but

Speaker 1: they should build them next to its heart. 13 years before, the Americans used nuclear weapons to destroy 2 Japanese cities.

Speaker 0: Kano wanted to do the opposite. Instead of annihilation, creation. He suggests blowing up a mountain with atomic bombs.

Speaker 1: That way they could gather enough land to fill in two-thirds of the entire bay, creating a 1,500 square kilometer plot that they could build upon. This is the first plan for the Tokyo Bay.

Speaker 2: I can tell that you're not using a VPN, you unsaved, uncivilized animal. That's why you need Surfshark, the sponsor of this week's video. Surfshark keeps your personal data protected from big companies or cyber criminals. Something that young men who spend way too much time on the internet watching the most disgusting things online probably should keep an eye on. Surfshark will protect your privacy, even when connected to public Wi-Fi, which can be a goldmine for hackers.

Also, if you're lucky enough to watch Netflix with someone real, a VPN can mask your IP address. So you can watch whatever show you want, wherever you want. I once needed to perform CPR on my father, but when I opened up YouTube, it told me that the video was not available in my country. Luckily I had Surfshark and I could change my location to a country with a good sense for public safety. You can do the same thing by trying out Surfshark.

Click the link in the description and use the code HOOKDEAL to get 3 extra months for free.

Speaker 1: Surrounding the bay are 4 prefectures, the Tokyo City, Saitama, Kanagawa, and Chiba. Kano was

Speaker 0: a descendant of Chiba noblemen.

Speaker 1: In the future, he'd become the prefecture's governor. Chiba never really had the pull of Tokyo City,

Speaker 0: but by building land between them, Kano could change that.

Speaker 1: He suggests constructing a new international airport at Futsu, connecting the outside world to a small Chiban fishing village. Right next to his new airport, he plans a massive residential belt crossing the entire bay. On both sides are forests. On the east, a massive industrial zone with 24 zones. And on the west, more industrial zones, which are separated from the residential belt by 2 long strips of forest.

The west side is purposely dug 20 meters deep so that 100,000 ton tankers can dock. And finally, slicing the entire bay perpendicularly is a 20 meter deep canal connecting Haida with the port of Chiba. Kano's plan was profound. He opened up

Speaker 0: the minds of Tokyo's desperate elites to the idea of building on the bay.

Speaker 1: But his breakthrough plan wasn't perfect. Filling in two-thirds of the bay with land is not cheap, even if you do blow up a mountain.

Speaker 0: So instead, his plan gets picked up by the head of the Council for Industrial Planning, Matsunaga.

Speaker 1: This is the Neo-Tokyo Plan. Instead of massive chunks of land, the bay is now filled with islands. More detailed than Kano's first plan, the Neo-Tokyo plan has 8 distinct zones. Commercial, industrial, residential, recreation, and 2 airports instead of 1. The last 3 zones specifically describe ground transportation.

The largest being a super expressway that surrounds the entire bay and also crosses it. The smallest 1 being a smaller expressway encircling the bay within. And the last being a super rapid railway that hugs the super expressway and connects the new islands with prefectures outside of the Tokyo metropolitan area. In the Neo Tokyo plan, there's still an airport by Futsu, but now there's also another international airport planned for the center of the bay. The Neo-Tokyo plan is detailed, but like Kano's plan before it, the Neo-Tokyo plan didn't come without its critics.

Critics who also had ideas for what needed to happen to the bay. In the 1960s, a group of Japanese architects introduced a new architectural philosophy. We hope to create something which, even in destruction, will cause subsequent new creation.

Speaker 0: This something must be found in

Speaker 1: the form of the cities we were going to make. Cities constantly undergoing the process of metabolism." I didn't really understand any of that either. For these 5 kind of pretentious architects, cities were not concrete rigid and flexible structures. They were organisms. Buildings were cells of a much larger, constantly changing system that could easily be changed and destroyed while the form remained the same.

Roads were like nerves in a much larger nervous system. Different functions of the city acted like organs. These metabolists conjured up radically new ideas for architecture, Dreaming up ideas for cities that looked like giant animals. Buildings that were as much part of the sky as the land. An architecture designed to grow, contracting and expanding with time.

Speaker 0: The Metabolists were ambitious, And they had ideas for what needed to happen to the bay. The first of the metabolists to go against the Neo-Tokyo plan is Otaka. Instead of moving tons of soil, and still requiring foundations, Otaka believed that the bay should

Speaker 1: be filled with high-rise apartments

Speaker 0: built on pillars directly above water. Instead of moving tons of soil, they only need to build a bunch of small mini islands. According to Otaka, but probably not to any structural engineer, the pillars with some occasional use of land would be much less expensive than filling the entire bay. For zoning, Otaka designed it so that the industrial areas face the opening side of the bay. The residential housing would be placed on

Speaker 1: an outer belt, which was then sliced by commercial zones. For transportation, there would be an interlooped highway and railway. Like Kano's plan before it, Otaka's industrial belt is also purposely dug 20 meters deep for docking. Otaka was 1 of the few metabolists to actually be taken seriously. The plans that came after him were a much harder pill to swallow.

Speaker 0: Kurokawa was a young 25-year-old architect who presented 2 separate plans for the bay. For his first, he suggested converting the city into a giant organism that reached into the bay. The city would be built with 2 metaphorical hands, 1 for international communication and the other for domestic. It would have a head serving as the central axis, an entrance to the capital. Crossing his city diagonally are 2 other separate axes, dotted with 2 buildings he had designed.

The buildings were intended to hold entire villages, the bamboo housing community, and the plant housing community.

Speaker 1: For a second plan, Kurokawa would be even more ambitious.

Speaker 0: Called the Ocean City, He proposed building helix land units that could be connected on top by a giant highway. These helixes would connect to form much larger cells, which were then connected by more highways, forming a nervous system that could expand organically like a slime mold. Parts of the cell could then be taken away, and then the form would still remain, slowly retracting and contracting into the Tokyo Bay.

Speaker 1: Both of Kurokawa's plans were considered unrealistic, but even he was not the most radical of the metabolists.

Speaker 0: Kikutake was obsessed with building megastructures and leaving the ground. He dreamed up ideas of tightly packing floating hexagons to build cities on top of, expandable chains of floating balls, and drifting cylinder cities with buildings that served as buoys. Kikutake's plan for the Tokyo Bay was 1 of the most ambitious but also 1 of the most obscure. It was the most visually limited of all the plans that were presented, but also the largest.

Speaker 1: He created 3 separate boroughs, a borough by Kyoto to protect against flooding, another by Harumi, and the most staggering, a grid that stretched across the entire bay.

Speaker 0: All 3 boroughs were connected by a gigantic loop highway, and the biggest grid in the middle of the bay would contain floating housing and factories that linked together with the grid road system. When certain elements of the city became redundant, they could be released off of the megastructure and be sunk. All of these plans made by the metabolists had some common features. They were large, they were designed to maintain an overall shape even if certain pieces were removed, and they were all connected by extensive roadways. If you look far enough, you could also catch a glimpse of something alive.

But another thing that binded the Metabolists was their teacher and leader, Kenzo Tange, the man who designed the most extensive plan for the Tokyo Bay, and who came pretty damn close to actually being successful. Tange was the blend between all 4 plans for the Bay. He had the political will and savviness of Kano. He made his plan public and mobilized media to get his ideas into the minds of citizens and actual politicians. Like Kurokawa, he imagined a structure that was built on a giant spine, but which also grew over time from the mainland city.

Like Higutake, he fetishized the idea of a massive megastructure. And like Otaka, he also wanted to build on pillars. This is Kenzo Tanke's plan for the Tokyo Bay, a linear city that builds off of a massive looping spine. His city would house 10 million people and like Kano's plan before it, connect the Tokyo City with Chiba on the other side of the bay. Each vertebrae is a 9km long unit, which consists of 3 decks of looping highways.

Perpendicular to the major spine, roads would connect to A-frame megastructures, a 138m tall megastructure that had its own artificial ground. Within the spine are zones for government buildings, offices, shopping, hotels, recreation, a new central station, and a new harbor. The buildings within the spine are also constructed on pillars so that they can hover above the ground. Like Kurokawa, Tange believed in creating a system that could procedurally grow over time.

Speaker 1: As opposed to radial growth, Tange advocated for linear growth inspired by the development of the spines in mammals. He also believed that the future of cities revolved around the car, so his plan was made highly dependent on

Speaker 0: the use of the automobile.

Speaker 1: It was also an attempt to control it.

Speaker 0: Kenzo was responding to a world that was undergoing rapid development,

Speaker 1: an idea to control and organize a society that was growing rapidly.

Speaker 0: But for all the effort that was put in Kenzo's plan

Speaker 1: and the others, none actually became a reality. They were too large, too intimidating, and too much of a risk. But Tokyo still expanded into the bay. Over the

Speaker 0: years, the city has climbed into the bay slowly from all sides, but just with no utopian grand plan in sight. There may not be a linear city built on water, but today more than 15% of the Tokyo Bay has been reclaimed. And even in 2022, there are still dreams to build on the bay.

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The $41 Billion Plan for Tokyo Explained