Promenade into the gap: Tokyo's impossible void

Abstract

This paper discusses the importance of gaps in urban space and cityscape. It proposes that gaps are particularly important in high-density urban areas, testifying of the options for urban densification and presents the case study of Tokyo's J.R. Yamanote railway and Shibuya district to support this idea. In the case of the J.R. Yamanote line – a railway with a concentric layout serving Tokyo's central districts – we see how gaps initially created under elevated sections of this structure gradually disappeared and became occupied by new urban tissues, allowing urban growth to continue taking place in the city centre. In Shibuya, where no more land was available, gaps were used to support a strategy of space usage intensification. While physically transportation and commercial infrastructures appeared absorbing all gaps between them, some amusement facilities such as a cable-car or a planetarium were the devices created to expand the visual horizon beyond the increasingly dense urban space. These findings reveal that in such processes, gaps have appeared, disappeared and in some cases reappeared to promote continuous urban intensification processes essential to the preservation of urban centrality.