Simon Wilson: Commercial chaos in the midst of Japanese order

Commercial chaos or the secret to a city's success? Tokyo's Shinjuku district.

Tokyo is one of the most highly organised cities in the world. It has one of the biggest and best-functioning transit systems and it's acclaimed for its cleanliness and safety. That's not because Japanese people somehow have clean and safe genes the rest of us lack, but because they planned it that way.

So how come it's also got Shinjuku, a much-loved shopping district featuring a labyrinth of back alleys, full of tiny shops and yakitori bars, all randomly stuffed into buildings and side streets? How does such commercial chaos stand a chance?

Think flocks of birds. Or, as the scientists like to say, it's the science of complex systems. Random individual choices have a way of turning into patterns, usually spontaneously, and once the patterns begin, they bloom.

Planners call it "emergent urbanism" and there's a book about it: Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, by Jorge Almazan, an architect and professor at Keio University, and writer Joe McReynolds.

"The general definition," says Almazan, "is the creation of order and functionality from the bottom up … without the need for a central brain that organises everything." There's no boss bird telling the flock what to do.

In the streets of Omoide-Yokocho, Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Most cities evolved like that but at some point things got turned around: the authorities started using zoning and other regulations to dictate what could be done where.

There's value in regulations – for health and safety, to start with – but not when top-down planning stifles local character. One shopping village starts to look very like the next; in a shopping mall you could be anywhere in the world. The early images used to promote Auckland's Commercial Bay actually were just renderings of similar complexes in New York.

Corporate malls do generate a consumerist buzz but they don't, as McReynolds says, offer "a sense of community, spontaneity, idiosyncrasy, surprise that really make our cities flourishing and exciting places to be".

How did Tokyo do it differently? With permissive regulations. McReynolds says that even in the most residentially zoned parts of the city, building owners "can, by right, operate a bar, a restaurant, a boutique, a small workshop on the ground floor". Microspaces are available to rent, everywhere. "Any elderly homeowner," he says, "could decide to rent out the bottom floor of their place to some young kid who wants to start a coffee shop."

Rents are cheap, licences to operate are easy to get: you could run a place with half a dozen stools at the counter, serving one dish a night, because the overheads are so low.

Town planning and urban design have to respond to real-world activity. Working from home has opened possibilities. In the central city, the old way of shops isn't working so well anymore, so people who want to trade must find new ways. Don't wait for the council and don't act only in your own narrow self-interest. You're a flock of birds.

As McReynolds says, "The key is building a coalition of folks who are more interested in the dynamism of their cities than they are in the value of their particular property."

The chaos and the quiet: Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Design for Living is a weekly series devoted to bright ideas that make cities better, appearing in Canvas magazine.