The Value of Grey

Abstract

Modern urban planning, initiated in Western Europe and North America at the dawn of the twentieth century, framed the concept of "city" as an area where no agricultural land uses should be included. In Japan, however, the demarcation between the city and countryside was ambiguously "grey" in comparison to that of Western cities. This ambiguous mixture of urban and rural land uses characterized both the fringe and the interior of Japanese cities as well. Edo, the former name of Tokyo, was already the largest city in the world in the eighteenth century with more than one million people; but at the same time, welcomed and was quite compatible with a vast amount of agricultural land that covered more than 40% of the city. Detesting an ambiguous "grey" mixture and adoring homogeneity and clear "black-and-white" separation of land were the precepts of modern urban planning; that is, how modern urban planners framed the problem of building sustainable cities .