Urban farming in Tokyo 165Totten (Japanese citizenship holder and half-farmer, half-company president;
Totten 2009; Kosaka 2010; Baba 2014). For these part-time agriculturalists, the
city and its associated peri-urban areas are an essential place to maintain their
“half-farmer, half-X” life. Therefore, the urban-rural mixture in cities, a unique
characteristic of Tokyo’s land use, once again shows its potential in providing
opportunities for citizens to create unique hybrid lifestyles.
A vision of cities in Asia in the twenty-first century
As we’ve suggested, integrated play and work is supported by intermingled
cities and farms. Cities are places of both consumption and production. There is
actually a city that had already realized this future vision of Japan in which agro-
activities are incorporated into society. It is Tokyo’s predecessor, Edo. Edo, one of
a handful of the world’s megacities that had a population of more than 1 million
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was a garden city with numerous farms
integrated into the city. Fujii, Yokohari, and Watanabe (2002) reconstructed the
land use in Edo in the mid-nineteenth century based on historical documents and
maps. They found that, at the time, a little more than 40 per cent of land in Edo
was used for agriculture and that numerous farms were interspersed in the urban
area radiating outward for a distance of 4 and 6 km from the Edo Castle. Local
production and local consumption were thoroughly enforced, with vegetables
produced on farms within the city being consumed within the city. Meanwhile,
Edo maintained an outstanding sanitary environment that was unmatched by any
other megacity in the world at the time, whereby human waste generated in the
city was returned to the farms. Describing it in modern terms, Edo was a smart
city with relatively little environmental burden and high-quality amenities. The
coexistence of city and farms was a manifestation of Edo’s advanced environment.
In Edo, cut off from the rest of the world as a result of Japan’s policy of isolation
and to which the modern concept of work based in the industrial revolution was
not introduced, coupled with the close proximity of places of residence and places
of work, it is easy to imagine that play and work were indivisibly integrated.
However, no matter how wonderful Edo’s ideology was, we who live in the
twenty-first century cannot return to the pre-modern era. If we understand the
city as we see it today as comprising multiple layers—starting with a foundation
of the natural environment including the terrain, water system, and vegetation,
superimposed by the city of Edo, which in turn is superimposed by the city of
Tokyo—we should not take the reactionary approach of denying the Tokyo layer
and seeking to return to the Edo layer. Rather, we should recognize and accept all
of these layers and develop a new vision for the city beyond today.
With the shrinking of the city, we begin to see the various layers of the city with
greater clarity, including deeper layers that have, up to this point, been overpowered
by the modern metropolis of Tokyo. What is beginning to emerge is a hybrid of
these various layers, manifested in the form of intermingled city and farms and agro-
activities. It is in such hybrids that fuse both universality and uniqueness without
contradiction that we see the greatest potential for a new vision of Asian cities in the
twenty-first century.