Toward A New Resilience

The urbanization of Tokyo took place in conjunction with a near continuous series of unprecedented disasters, events, and reconstructions; from the early fires in the Edo Era, to the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, the fire-bombing of World War II, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Great East Japan Earthquake, and somewhat anti-climactic, the 2020 Olympic Games. After each event history was marked and Tokyo was changed, usually improved, built back better. This chapter lightly unveils the secret behind the city’s ability to recover and make use of transformational events. We conclude that Tokyo’s resilient and adaptive urban system is based on three fundamentals—a strong rail network, livable communities, and convective flows. These fundamentals are supported by a complicated urban nexus, and an entangling mesh of sectors and people that reaches to every corner of the city and acts at multiple scales. The example of Tokyo shows that resilient and adaptive cities rely on the cooperation of both human stakeholders and multiple layers of physical factors. This insight could be valuable for growing cities in emerging countries. It provides a basis for the advancement of urban resilience and adaptivity.