'Kidai Shoran, Excellent View of Our Prosperous Age in Edo'

On a 12-metre-long hand scroll, the activities of a Tokyo shopping street around 1805 are pictured. An anonymous city painter illustrates pre-modern everyday life in the city, depicting in detail houses, shops, bridges, infrastructure, small-scale architecture, animals and more than 1,600 people, mostly men. The 'comic strip' begins and ends with bridges that lead across two rivers, with scenes of everyday life between them. The figures presented are highly individualised and do not want to form an anonymous crowd. Various stories are told, spatially side by side and simultaneously in time. The characters and objects on display seem to have lost the ground under their feet; they inhabit and enliven the Japanese scroll. This makes the painting appear filigree and sublime, while the everyday scenes portrayed give a poetic impression, even though an enormous density and intensity is displayed here. The result is an attractive contradiction between substance and presentation, between observation and implication. In his work, the city painter dissolves the urban structure into numerous acts, disperses and particularises it. The street becomes a space of communication, exchange and action. Kidai Shoran presents a dynamic understanding of space; space is not a container but is constructed from different relations between actions and perceptions.

Tokyotic Amalgam

Today, the Tokyo Metropolitan Area is the world’s largest urban agglomeration with over 37 million inhabitants. Looking down onto the city from the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo, one can observe a tangled flicker, tiny and densely arranged particles covering the hilly terrain. Each particle is highly accurate, follows specific rules and is renewed approximately every 25 years. A dynamic that is still foreign to the European city. Tokyo appears as an artificial landscape, a seemingly endless interior space where it might even rain. The categorisations of inside and outside, of public and private, apparently fall apart here. Everything seems to have its position and purpose, even the smallest gap, the tiniest interspace, is programmatically loaded and animated.

In this Tokyotic amalgam there is no inner city, there is no urban sprawl, there are only settlements of the most varied forms and scales; potted plants, mini-houses, apartment blocks and high-rise buildings are alternated, connected, and supplied by precisely organised infrastructures and networks. The combination of a small plot structure, Japanese building-regulations and adventurous property prices results in a heterogeneous, dense, but low-rise development, from which the traffic and consumption nodes protrude like mountains. These are constructed economic figures of the 'Total Living Industry'.[1] In Japan public transport is operated by private corporations. Already in the 1920s there was a railway line in Osaka with a station that also functioned as a department store, thus optimally fulfilling the shopping demands of the connected residential areas in the suburbs. Today, these corporations act as land utilisation companies, construction companies, prefab manufacturers of housing, department store operators, internet service providers, banks, railway and bus line operators, but also as providers of social and cultural services such as hospitals, universities, golf clubs and cultural centres, thus 'serving' almost all aspects of life.

Tokyo’s high densities and intensities avoid the thinning of urban space, which would gradually result in privatisation. The numerous particles, let’s call them dots, do not mainly refer to one site, plot or geography, but to multiple networks. We might argue that the smaller the sections of space and the subspaces become, the greater will be the material and immaterial infrastructures that make this division possible in the first place.

Dividual Spaces and Dividual Subjects

The interconnected urban nomad is provided everywhere in Tokyo with mini-infrastructures such as vending machines, lockers, gaming and washing machines as well as Konbinis.[2] Moreover, small spatial units can be temporarily occupied with various programmes. The 'ownership' of space is now replaced by the accessibility of it at a certain, usually quite short time interval.

In 2006, Jorge Almazán Caballero and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto[3] described this category as 'Dividual Space', spaces and facilities within economic environments that are used privately by the general public at a low price. The focus hereby lies on the intersection between commercial and public, as well as domestic and private milieus, such as Manga Kissa, Karaoke-Box or Love-Hotel. Initially, Manga Kissa were comic cafés, today they are a housing substitute for Tokyo’s working poor.

In the last 15 years several new 'subspaces' have developed, such as Co-Working or Co-Living-Spaces as well as Airbnb, not only in Tokyo, but worldwide. Fragmented life patterns produce fragmented spatial typologies and transform the individual into a dividual.

Dividual spaces form the basis for spaces of dividual subjects, which – drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s incisive text about control societies – represent a type of contemporary antithesis to the individual. As opposed to indivisible individuals, we are dealing here with a conception of subjectivity that primarily manifests in the mode of dividing – in the different roles we all perform, in daily multitasking, in precarious working conditions, but also in the architecture of dividual spaces: spaces of sharing, but also spaces of division that are characteristic of an urban life that increasingly takes place at sites outside of or in the interstitial space between private and public.[4]