The Changing Nature of the City
What is a city? To say this without fear of misunderstanding, the object to which the word city refers has become increasingly ambiguous to me over the years. The same is true of urban design. The very thing that is meant to be designed has grown unclear in my mind, to the point that urban design itself sometimes feels like an attempt to act upon something without substance—like trying to grasp a cloud.
When I was invited to respond to the theme of this issue, “Thinking about the future of cities and urban design,” I felt a certain unease. I wondered whether I would be able to respond to it in a positive way. This may simply reflect my own waning interest in the city. But at the same time, I also feel that the way we understand the city—particularly in Japan, in our own time—has changed significantly.
Looking back, when I first began studying architecture around twenty years ago, the relationship between architecture and the city was still actively discussed. I believed that architecture was necessarily grounded in the city as a place. The architecture I encountered through the media seemed rooted in urban conditions, and there was a sense that while architecture was shaped by the city, the city could also be shaped by architecture.
If we look further back, we find that after the war, as Japan sought to rebuild itself and modernize as a nation, the city was often discussed as an extension of architecture, and many theories of the city emerged. During the years of rapid economic growth, with expansion as a shared premise, urban theories inspired by living organisms became an international movement in architecture. Even during the bubble era, new urban images were produced through symbolic and image-based understandings of the city within a consumer society. After the collapse of the bubble, the myth of endless growth also collapsed, and with it came new discussions—not of the city itself, but of peripheries, alternatives to the city, and the shrinking city.
I began studying architecture in the early 2000s. At that time, while urban development was still a central topic, attention was also beginning to shift toward the suburbs. For me, Takashi Homma’s Tokyo Suburbia vividly revealed a more immediate way of understanding the urban condition within everyday life.
City, Landscape, and Environment
Up to that point, I still had a strong sense that architecture unfolded on the premise of the city as a place. Yet over the past ten years or so, the ground on which architecture stands seems to have shifted—from the city to the landscape. This is because the city, centered increasingly on economic function, has become homogenized, gradually losing its tactile specificity and local meaning.
Architecture as part of a landscape has come to feel more real, and more valuable, than architecture as part of a city. In this shift, the city has relatively lost its value as a ground for architecture. Around the same time, I too began to feel that it had become increasingly difficult to grasp what kind of place the city actually is.
Why is this happening? In the great cities of the world—particularly the rapidly growing cities of Asia—economic efficiency has been prioritized above all else. As a result, new buildings disconnected from their environmental and historical contexts have risen everywhere, producing places that increasingly resemble one another. More and more people now inhabit homogenized spaces, encountering similar objects and similar information wherever they go.
Perhaps we no longer find the same value in what cities once represented: concentrations of people, things, and information. Globalization has undoubtedly brought many benefits to our lives. Yet at the same time, through its interaction with the relentless pursuit of economic efficiency, it has also produced flattened cities across the world, one after another.
And in recent years, climate change has become something we feel directly. What had previously been recognized as knowledge—something abstract but real—has now become undeniable through abnormal weather, destructive typhoons, and catastrophic floods that return each year. The endless economic activity centered on consumption, carried out across the globe, is only accelerating this process.
Cities seem to function more and more as places where people gather, consumption is intensified, and the economy is kept in motion, while losing sight of other purposes. This transformation has greatly unsettled the image of the city I once held. In such places, we live oddly contradictory lives: declining a plastic bag at a convenience store in the name of environmental concern, while gathering in energy-intensive redeveloped offices and commercial facilities to generate new forms of consumption.
What Is the Value of the City?
As cities continue to tilt toward consumption, it may be only natural that architecture has shifted its ground from the city to the landscape, as if seeking a new basis for survival. For me as well, the cities in which we now live have become something quite different from what I once understood as “the city.”
The unease I felt when asked to think about the future of cities and urban design—the strange emptiness of feeling that I might have no answer at all—may come from the gap between the city I had imagined and the city I actually experience. If we no longer find the same value as before in places where people, goods, and information are densely concentrated, then what, exactly, do we value in the city?
With advances in information technology, things and information can now be obtained easily, and there is less need to seek them in the city. On the other hand, experiences that can only be had in a particular place have steadily gained value. It is now ordinary to visit a place of extraordinary beauty, experience it firsthand, and share it through social media. During the pandemic, through staying at home and working remotely, we established ways of communicating at a distance and recognized their convenience. At the same time, we also learned that there is a depth to information and communication that can only be gained through meeting in person.
Among the many roles cities once played, the value of what is tied to place has increased.
Perhaps we are now being asked to reconsider, in a more fundamental way, what kind of place the city feels like to the body. What kind of place is it? What climate does it have? What histories and contexts shape it? What kinds of people inhabit it? The answers will differ from person to person, and will no doubt become more diverse. But it does seem that we are beginning to seek, in our everyday lives, places that have a kind of tactile familiarity.
I feel the same is true for architecture. As architects, we have already begun to shift our ground from the city to the landscape. Yet landscapes too are becoming increasingly unstable and transient, shaped by consumptive redevelopment, climate change, and natural disaster. In contrast, perhaps we will be forced to turn instead toward what changes only very slowly—toward topography, for example, or toward histories that cannot be rewritten—as the basis on which to make architecture.
Architecture Bound to the Land
With such thoughts in mind, I would like to introduce a few attempts from my own practice. They are small in scale—hardly something that could be called “urban” in any conventional sense—but they are attempts to explore what architecture might be in our time.
The first is a pair of projects I was involved in at Yashima in Takamatsu in 2022: the Yashima Mountain-top Exchange Hub Facility / Yashimaru, and Reigan Chaya. In these projects, I tried to relate architecture to topography—two things that exist on entirely different temporal scales—and to ask whether architecture might be treated as if it were part of the land itself.
For Yashimaru, the primary premise was the site’s topographical character and the surrounding environment protected as a national park. Rather than deriving the building from functional requirements, the project sought a form of architecture centered on discovering the latent potential of the place itself.
Reigan Chaya, by contrast, involved a building that had already undergone repeated extensions and alterations since the Taisho period. Rather than treating it simply as a building, I sought to understand it as part of the land—as a crystallization of time accumulated on that site—and to explore an architectural approach that could connect to that historical depth.
What these projects suggested was that architecture may gain value by developing deeper relationships, both with the physical reality of topography and with the more abstract reality of history. By connecting architecture to these different layers, the relationship between building and place can become more complex and more meaningful. In doing so, it may not only produce a unique architecture, but also transform the way the place itself is perceived. It gave me a sense that a new kind of tactile place-making—a new way of making places to belong—might become possible.
Architecture Bound to Memory
Another such attempt is the Dialogue Theater – Naomi Kawase Pavilion, one of the thematic pavilions for Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, in which I was involved as a designer. While the projects above were concerned primarily with how architecture might connect to the land itself, this project turned toward the memory held within architecture.
Among the things we value in everyday life, memory is surely one of them. Why, then, has contemporary architecture so rarely made memory its subject? I had hardly been conscious of it, but perhaps our age has come to value what can be easily explained, measured, and made efficient. And yet I had long felt that something important was being lost in the process. Memory, I came to feel, was one of those things.
I wanted to examine more deeply how architecture might relate to memory—something vague and difficult to define, yet likely tied to the very essence of architectural value.
The aim was to find a way to gather up the traces embedded in architecture—things that do not appear clearly in form, yet are undeniably there, like an atmosphere—and to treat them as part of design. We used a former school building awaiting demolition and transformed it into an Expo pavilion. In doing so, we attempted to share the memory inscribed in that space with people from all over the world, while also creating new memories within it.
This was not something easily explained in the way we have grown accustomed to in everyday life. Memory seemed to emerge not from any single element, but from the totality of countless small marks and traces present in the place. In the school building, eighty or ninety years old, the memories of children who had spent long years there seemed to connect with our own, so that although it was a place we were visiting for the first time, it somehow felt familiar. This was true not only for Japanese visitors, but also for foreigners, and even for children—as though they too were behaving as if they had known the place before.
Although the building would not remain in the same form after the Expo, the experience gave me hope that memory, once truly present in a place, might exist not only within a single building, but also at the scale of a community or even of the city.
Redefining the City
So once again, what is the city in our time?
Perhaps we are living at a moment when the very image evoked by the word city must be redefined. Rather than a place produced through the intensification of people, things, and information, perhaps we now need to return to more tactile relationships—with place, with time, with memory, and with the environment itself. Until now, we have built cities by gathering together only those things we believed we could control. But as the limitations of that approach become increasingly visible, we may have no choice but to accept nature as something beyond our control.
And yet beyond that, perhaps there lies the possibility of places where the artificial and the natural do not oppose one another, but gradually permeate each other.
Perhaps it is such places that we will come to call cities.
And if so, I hope they will be places where we can feel connected to things that exceed the timescale of a single human life—things like place, time, and memory. They should be places where we can sense, in a real way, that we are living on this earth.
(Published in UDC, Urban + Design No. 44, December 2025)