Ch.5, pp.238-244

June 15, 2025

238-239
240-241
242-243

I apologize for not ending the previous installment at a natural break. This installment is the second last, and picks up from here. Yamamoto returns to his theme of housing that isn’t just a place to live, but that has been designed as a place in which commercial activity can also happen. There’s much resistance to this idea, partly because we consume the housing we are given, but mostly because employers want to keep work and living separated, each with their dedicated spaces and typologies. Remember how architecture in the 1950s and 1960s was all about office buildings? Remember in 2022 how people discovered they could work from home and how they liked it? Remember how they had to be forced to get back to their desks and offices? Yet, it’s okay for elite private hedge-fund managers to work from home. Our cities would look very different if they weren’t required to be the capitalist engines they are. Our suburbs would also look and feel very different if our dwellings weren’t designed to keep us isolated from each other. Even to speak of “work-life balance” implies buying into the continuation of this status quo.

Much housing that is also a place for economic activity has been lost and today, examples remain only in shopping streets. (Figs. 11,12) A city cannot be configured from housing for wage laborers, that has no other purpose and no mutual relationship to each other. Each unit exists independently. Housing built solely to be lived in has become our standard housing. We don’t for a moment think of these adjacent but isolated dwellings with no relationship to each other as being strange in any way.

Fig. 11: Post-WWII Rokkakubashi Shopping Street (photo: Author’s own) Ground floor is a store and above is a residence. Prototypical urban housing. Prototype for a community.

Legal restrictions are one major reason why we have housing in which economic activity doesn’t take place. It’s simply not permitted in dwellings [aka. condominiums (US), flats (U.K.), mansions (Japan)] for example. Other residents wouldn’t allow it, even if there weren’t any legal restrictions. We live in dwellings that have been made into products that are the places where we live. Those dwellings have been designed that way. The product value of these dwellings lies in their providing privacy and security. We have given little thought to dwelling typologies that allow for commercial activity. Twentieth century architects didn’t propose spaces in which this was possible. Instead, they focussed solely on dwellings as private spaces. We still believe that this is what our dwellings should be.

Local Community Sphere

The Local Community Sphere is the theme for deriving a housing typology in which living and economic activity can occur together. It’s not about providing private spaces for each resident but about providing spaces where multiple activities are permitted. Even if we assume that the system of one-household per dwelling exists to allow freedom of one’s private life, the Local Community Sphere is a living space in which people have the will and the freedom to decide for themselves. It’s a space where there is Jefferson’s “freedom to exercise one’s public rights”. It is a place that can be called a community. The Local Community Sphere is a space that materializes community. It is through this materialization that we see for the first time what a community is.

It is extremely important that the Local Community Sphere has rights peculiar to the locality if it is to be a place for economic activity. This economic activity enables a branding power characteristic to the locality as it makes rich spaces that welcome visitors. It says that this is where the local people live. It is the space itself that is the message for the people visiting. In other words, it is the external appearance. The (commonsense) perception that this is possessed by the space is fostered and the residents are enabled to actualize themselves.

The Local Community Sphere is such a space. It is itself an economic sphere. How these individual houses are made is extremely important. What kind of housing could take the place of housing designed for the system of one household per dwelling?

My studio produced a proposal for a Local Community Sphere e. The team consisted of design assistants and graduate students from the National University of Yokohama where I have my studio, members of the Yokohama City Architecture Bureau who are dealing with the actual city, as well as people from Tokyo Gas, Shimizu Construction, Mitsubishi Branch Office, Nissan Automobiles, as well as technicians related to both government and industry. The experiment was to provisionally calculate the energy efficiency and the economic efficiency, the economic effect, as well as the synergetic effect taking infrastrcture into account. But what kind of way of living was to be designed for? What kind of infrastructure would be needed? What kind of residential support facilities would need to be designed? The answers to these questions were more important than the architecture itself.

We anticipated a new type of housing supply system completely different from the supply system for housing up till now.

The proposal was published in the book Local Community Sphere-ism [my translation] but the following are the main points.

(1) Housing with a threshold

Housing is more than a place that provides privacy for a private life. Housing must have a spatial configuration that that enables residents to participate in the exercise of the rights of that locality (community). Thresholds. A place for a store.

Here, Yamamoto is using the characters for “see (the) world” (見世, pronounced mi-se) to write the Japanese word for store (店, pronounced mi-se). He’s making the point that commercial activity is authentic community activity. It thrives on the opposite of privacy.

Here, the threshold is a place for economic activity. It is a public space. It is a place where participation in the community happens. It is a public space in the midst of the private space that is the residence. We designed the space to be this kind of space. The Local Community Sphere is an economic sphere with the configuration of stores as its focus.

(2) Simultaneous design of infrastruucture

In the system of one household per dwelling, infrastructure operations such as transportation and energy are items that are provided by the nation (as part of a bureaucratic mechanism). Japanese housing policy is to divide and conquer by making national enterprises responsible for infrastructure and leaving housing to be a private consumer item. The infrastructure operations are at the discretion of the bureaucracy and all public space is made as infrastructure. “Public space is space for the public to pass through and not for people to live.” (The Senate, The Loss of Publicness, p.30) This is because all public space is the end points of infrastructure. The discretion of the bureaucracy is said to be in the interests of the public. There is absolutely no respect for the opinions of the people living in the one household per house system. Private lives are seen as nothing more than private profit.

The Local Community Sphere aims to change that configuration. Infrastructure is not something provided by national enterprises from outside. In the Local Society Zone it is designed beforehand.

(3) A means for decision making, the possession of information, and the protection of confidentiality within the Local Society Sphere /

(4) System for the protection of daily life

One half of the total of the National Budget General Account and the Special Account is set aside for expenses related to national (social) insurance. This shows that the system of national social insurance based upon one household per dwelling is already broken. How the national social insurance system is configured within the Local Community Sphere must at the same time create jobs in fields such as nursing, environmental maintenance [I take this to mean in the sense of maintenance of the immediate environment such as in building and garden maintenance, cleaning, garbage collection and recycling, etc.], domestics, and kindergartens.

(5) Specialist groups

Decision making must have cooperation between the residents of the Local Community Sphere and various specialist groups. Various occupations in fields such as energy, environmental protection, medical services, nursing and childcare are available to the residents. The Local Community Sphere is a deliberative committee. It is an intermediary body between the nation and the individual. Specialist groups are also intermediary bodies between the nation and the individual.

(6) Architectural space must be fascinating.

The architectural space must have an appearance that conveys messages such as “This is where we are” or “We belong to this place.” That appearance does not change even if the space is changed by persons coming after. The space remains fascinating while at the same time being flexible. There must be an architectural system that enables this.

FIgure 13: A Local Community Sphere as a three-dimensional shopping street.
(Illustration: Take Kamoi, Source: Riken Yamamoto et al. Local Community Sphere-ism, Zouho [?] Publ, revised edition, p.22-23)

This is the book. You can buy it on Japanese Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/地域社会圏主義-増補改訂版-LIXIL出版-山本-理顕/dp/4864803048 It doesn’t look like there’s an English translation. Given that Yamamoto’s main concern is in providing an alternative to the nation’s drive to maintain the position of housing as a consumer item rather than as decent places to live one’s lives with meaningful and productive contact with others, I doubt there ever will be.

Here’s a link to an NHK (Japan’s national broadcaster) video where Yamamoto talks about Local Community Spheres. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2105132/