Tokyo as an Olympic city across modern history: planning culture as the intangible heritage from a century of hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chosen three times as the host city for the Summer Olympic Games (1940, 1964 and 2020), Tokyo's city layout is historically linked to the Olympics. Including the bid project for the 1960 and the 2016 Games, Tokyo has presented five Olympic projects, each time with five different urban visions which enlighten the nature of the past and present political Japanese regimes. The recurrence of the Olympic Games in the planning and growth of Tokyo leads to the idea of a major influence of the Olympics both on the physical evolution of the urban structure but also on that, immaterial, of its planning culture – or, in other words, on the representations, imaginary and practices of the institutional stakeholders of Tokyo's urban fabric. The aim of the paper is therefore double. First, it analyses each urban vision of the Games of 1940, 1964 and 2020. Secondly, it analyses the influence of each Olympic project on greater Tokyo's urban planning and regional development, as well as the influence of each Olympiad on the following ones. Doing that, the paper discusses the formalization of a planning culture through organizing the Olympics on the long run in Tokyo.