Tokyo, Friday morning. 6.30am to be more precise. A sushi and beer birthday breakfast, preceded by the famous tuna auction at 5am. Up to $10m worth of tuna sold within an hour, with typical Japanese efficiency and respect for protocol.
An extraordinary sight to behold. But, truth be told, the new, high-tech Toyosu market is not a patch on the famous, traditional Tsukiji market, where you could get closer to the action, and the byzantine streets compressed around it provided a pulsating variety of fresh sushi options.
Not all change is good. Or, rather, not all transitions to modernity suit or serve everyone’s needs. Cities are constantly evolving; that’s what makes them so captivating and resilient. Tokyo is facing interesting new challenges caused primarily by Japan’s shifting demographic profile.
First came the big migration to the big cities. Then as the population aged rapidly ― by 2050, 40% of Japanese will be over 65 ― the impact on city planning and life began to be felt. One in 10 properties in the capital city are vacant (one in seven throughout the country as a whole); around half the homes in this vast metropolis ― the largest in the world, with 44-million inhabitants of greater Tokyo ― are single occupancy.
Sustaining the kind of society that Japan is admired for ― superb transport and infrastructure in particular, as well as a relatively egalitarian form of enterprise capitalism ― will become even more challenging.
As the authors of a fascinating study of Tokyo, Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Kayoko Ota, argue, Tokyo is at the forefront of important changes that will soon effect other cities around the globe.
South African cities are not quite in the same demographic boat. They continue to grow steadily, anything between 1% and 2%, over the past decade or so, enough to put additional pressure on already stretched public agencies and creaking infrastructure.
Moreover, the growth tends to happen in peri-urban areas rather than city centres, reflecting a perennial weakness in urban planning in South Africa, namely, the failure to grasp the nettle of densification.
Despite the fundamental demographic difference, there is a spatial development similarity between Tokyo’s challenge and that facing South African municipalities that, to borrow the words of Mostafavi and Ota, poses a common question: “What does it mean to speak of sharing the city? Isn’t the city always shared by its inhabitants, by those who live and work there? One would expect the answer to be an emphatic yes. But invariably this idealism is not matched by the reality of the situation.”
This, in many respects, was the concern that came before South Africa’s Constitutional Court in the Tafelberg case, which handed down a groundbreaking judgment in early July in which the court ruled that the City of Cape Town had acted unconstitutionally in selling land in Sea Point to a private entity rather than respecting its constitutional duty to actively consider using such well-located land for affordable, social housing.
Location, the court held, is a vital part of the right to access adequate housing: “A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.” Relying solely on cheaper peripheral development perpetuates apartheid-era spatial segregation and economic exclusion.
The opening paragraph of the unanimous judgment, penned by judge Nonkosi Mhlantla, frames the issue powerfully: “At its core, this case raises a fundamental constitutional question: how do we, as a society, in a free, democratic dispensation, address the enduring legacy of spatial apartheid? The submissions in these matters have highlighted the crucial distinction between merely distributing resources and ensuring that those resources are distributed in a manner that actively dismantles historical inequalities shaped by race and class along geographical lines.”
The judgment will have a huge impact on urban policy and planning. It ought to change the political game, too. And in less than four months’ time the residents of South Africa’s cities will vote to decide which, if any, of those seeking election can fulfil every resident’s “right to the city”.
Is there a mayoral candidate brave and bold enough to take this on and make it the centrepiece of their campaign?
Calland is a visiting adjunct professor at the Wits School of Governance and director of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership Africa.
Business Day
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