Reclaimed Land: Waterfront as Tabula Rasa

Land reclamation has a long history in Japan, where urban settlements are often squeezed between coasts and a mountainous interior. Since the premodern period, Tokyo's shoreline has been transformed incrementally to create residential, commercial, and industrial districts. Roughly 15% of the original bay area has now been filled in.

Unbound by the constraints of topography, land-use restrictions, and complex ownership patterns that prevail in the city, this reclaimed land has long provided sites for experimentation. Over the centuries, newly constructed waterfronts have hosted airports, factories, fishing villages, garbage dumps, palaces, theme parks, and districts reserved for foreign residents. In the 1960s, the bay was the tabula rasa on which Kenzo Tange and the Metabolists, among others, imagined radical new forms of urbanization. The glitzy high-rises and shopping malls that emerged on the reclaimed land of Odaiba provide a tantalizing, if unconvincing, glimpse of these futuristic aspirations.

Recent years have brought a renewed interest in the ecological and recreational functions of the waterfront. Kasai Rinkai Park, Tokyo Sea Forest Park, and other waterfront greenswards hint at a new relationship between the city and its environment. As Tokyo struggles to reclaim its connection with the bay, reclaimed land will again be the proving ground for new forms of urbanization.