TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Japan
By Esther
Transnational global cities have
been popping up all
over the world and as the
ties between various counties are further
developed, the inevitable reconstruction and restructuring of
pre-existing cities is creating more and more network-dependent world
cities. Takashi Machimura in his “Urban Restructuring Process in Tokyo
in the 1980s: Transforming Tokyo into a World City” explores this
global city trend though his case study of a major Japanese city,
Tokyo. Kobe, another Japanese up-and-coming global city, and is
currently being transformed into a transnational global city.
There were automated train ticket
machines that spit out magnetized tickets that would then be fed into
gate machines that both allowed and denied access to certain stops
depending on the information on that magnetized ticket. The trains
themselves were quick and clean- always on time- and somehow the tracks
were laid out so to transform these traditionally large clumsy machines
into efficient delicate dancers, perpetually in a performance that wove
its passengers in between, above and around the vernacular houses of
the old and the transnational, super skyscrapers of the new global city.
Historically centered around
small
clusters of families and villages, the towns in Japan were spread out
and self-sufficiency was a given. But now in our increasingly global
world, the globalization of Japan has made Japan perhaps the most
network-dependent country in the world. The train system is much like
the bloodstream of Japan. Both linking major skyscraper to major
skyscraper within Kobe to branching out in larger veins to other towns
like Tokyo and Kyoto, the train system fosters both internal and
international economic, cultural, and physical exchange.
As part of this transnational
human flow within the
trains, I witnessed the active reconstructing of the Japanese
landscape. From the countryside to the cities, the menagerie of
vernacular, modern, and transnational buildings composed a colorful
image that looked as if these buildings were one collective sea
anemone, inching its way inland to the furthest recesses it could grab
on to and still reaching.
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