Beyond public: architects, activists, and the design of akichi at Tokyo’s Miyashita Park

Abstract

Peppered with galleries, ateliers, and upscale designer boutiques, Tokyo’s Shibuya ward is often described as a commercial haven for Japan’s urban fashionistas and style-conscious visitors. Within it, a narrow park sits atop a 1960s parking structure that was once a refuge for nearly one hundred homeless city residents until most were forcibly removed in 2010 by city officials. Dozens of blue tarp tents, umbrellas, weathered shoes, and cherished belongings were discarded, and the people who had lived there were fenced out indefinitely. Although this striking contrast of urban socioeconomic disparity is one that characterises many cities across the globe, the juxtapositions in Shibuya have been made increasingly visible by strong cohorts of unrelenting activists who have ignited decades of discourse and scholarly debate about individual rights to cities, as well as the role and agency of architects in the designing of public spaces. This article combines participant observations of art activists, semi-structured and oral history interviews of homeless residents in Tokyo, as well as historical analysis, to examine these tensions as they have played out at Miyashita Park in Shibuya, including how perpetual redesigns of the park by architects and urban planners tasked with ‘re-activating’ the park in the 1960s, 2000s, and again in the late 2010s, have been vehemently opposed. More specifically, the article examines how a vocal group of art activists organised in opposition to the park’s most recent redesign efforts sponsored by Nike and the idea that such a public-private partnership could produce an inclusive public space. Instead, the activists worked to problematise the appropriateness of terms such as ‘public’ altogether. Through art installations, writing, impromptu concerts, sporting events, and protests that engaged with the politics of their own bodies, the activists turned to alternative genealogies and definitions of ‘public’ as a way to connect more particularly to Japanese urban form and to resist hegemonic and imported concepts of ‘public’ as reproduced and reinforced by architects often without challenge. By drawing on alternative terms, such as akichi, meaning ‘open land’, the activists argue for a different sense of spatial inclusivity than the supposedly universal democratic ideals associated with designs for public spaces in Tokyo.