Nakano Flow: Designing for Spatial and Temporal Flow in urban Tokyo

Abstract

Urban Tokyo is an environment of flows, having rapidly developed from its feudal form of the Edo period through cycles of destruction, growth and transformation since modernization. The plaza space adjacent to Nakano Station in Tokyo exemplifies this pattern, with an urban context drawing from many different eras of Tokyo’s urban history and attitudes towards public space and the built environment. Drawing from observations of patterns of use in the site and urban context, the lessons of Nakano’s eras of development, movements in urban design theory and from research into Japanese concepts of “movement space”, this thesis explores the creation of a new Nakano Station plaza. Prompted by proposals for the redevelopment of Nakano Station, this plaza proposal explores the development of an urban infrastructure that is adaptable and host to organic development over time. This infrastructure will also reconnect the urban fabric and Nakano’s users and perceivers across the void of the current site by hybridizing the site strategies of geometric spatial reference systems and sequenced movement spaces. The new Nakano Station plaza will exist as a platform and scaffold space, upon which new uses and modes of development can be explored and adapted to best accommodate the demands of future urban Tokyo.