Architecture’s Role in Degrowth

Posturban Japan as a Place of Experimentation

A large portion of architectural discourse and practice responds to urban growth and technological advances associated with the city. How can architects can adapt their skill sets and use design thinking to support rural lifestyles with significantly different values from cities? Can architecture facilitate a “slower” daily life instead of a rapidly productive future? 

Additionally, how can urban dwellers adapted to the characteristics of city life be inspired to move to rural villages? While some published interviews with residents of villages describe scenarios where people moved back to their hometowns after attending university or working in cities for a number of years, predictive demographics indicate that more urbanites will need to move to the countryside to avoid the complete disappearance of most communities.

In 2018, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) developed a project called Islands and Villages with Kayoko Ota, editor of the book Project Japan, which was a collaboration between Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Olbrist on metabolist architecture. Islands and Villages strongly contrasts the era of metabolism in Japan. The project consists of essays and documentaries that feature architects typically practicing in the city in the unfamiliar context of depopulating rural areas. In her essay The Posturban Phenomenon, Ota states that these conditions provide “a new testing ground that involves reclaiming a process of understanding society through elaborate research, defining needs with residents and envisioning the various forms that a solution could take”. The Japanese countryside is described as a space for “unconventional measures and experimentation, beyond the administrative frameworks and capitalist logics of urban centers” by Ota, and in this way, “post-urban space”. 

Four architecture projects were featured as a part of Islands and Villages. One was Umaki Camp by dot Architects, and another was The Fishing School by Atelier Bow-Wow. Umaki Camp, as described, is a multi-purpose community space that designed to accommodate existing festival traditions in the village of Umaki. The building, designed and constructed by dot Architects, was developed through both formal community meetings and informal sessions between architects and residents. The materials for the buildings were locally sourced and processed on site, often with the help of the community members. The white stones and burnt cedar are recognizable emblems of Shodoshima. Toshikatsu Ienari stated that the informal assistance they received from the residents of Umaki was an unexpected but significant way for architects to conduct research on the needs of their users. Using the research, the architects drove the program of the project; dot Architects established public events and uses for the spaces that harnessed existing cultures and created new ones. The decision to design a community kitchen came from an existing culture of tabedasuke- which translates to “helping to eat”, where residents of Umaki share excess produce from their gardens with their neighbors. The kitchen created a place for residents to cook with their surplus vegetables together, something that everyone had been “too shy” to do before, as well as a public repository for extra food. 

Similarly, the Fishing School by Atelier Bow-Wow in Momonoura, Miyagi Prefecture was much more than the space and construction. The architects were heavily involved in the design of the curriculum of the school, which was intended to revitalize the fishing industry of a village heavily impacted by the 2011 tsunami. The “curriculum design” involved developing course materials, graphics and community events, all through in-depth interviews, workshops and time spent on-site in Momonoura. 

As discussed by Ota, much of this work incorporates unprecedented workflows that involve detailed research and design thinking and does not always manifest itself in physical tectonics. The designers in the examples are working to create different kinds of structure supported by the design of space, a process that involves a multitude of methodologies. As stated in the Posturban Phenomenon, the rural contexts of the projects allow for unstructured experimentation for different ways of working and the possibilities of “degrowth architecture”. 

The research of Hiroto Kobayashi, professor at Keio University and principal at Kobayashi Maki Design Workshop, also follows processes similar to those featured in Islands and Villages. However, while dot Architects and Atelier Bow-Wow have executed their design work and research in multiple locations in Japan, Hiroto Kobayashi’s research on depopulation is uniquely rooted in one site, the Tané Valley of Shiga Prefecture. Hiroto Kobayashi’s relationship with the community of Tané has been evolving for over ten years and has consisted of design projects and annual workshops with his students and members of Tané. The design work has been kept light in terms of physical intervention and has focused primarily on the ongoing renovation of a large old house in the village instead of the construction of new buildings. 

The house, referred to as The Tané House, is built with vernacular construction techniques of the area and is located in the middle of a traditional Japanese agricultural landscape of rice paddies bound by forest. Hiroto Kobayashi’s lab at Keio University has made incremental changes to the house with the intention of it becoming a flexible community centre. The workshops organized by the Kobayashi Lab bring high school and university students based in Tokyo to The Tané House, with the aim to educate visitors as well as local youth on cultural events and activities important to the region. These workshops often involve round-table discussions with people of all generations on the rapidly declining population of Tané. 

Umaki Camp, the Fishing School and the Tané House all aim to incorporate strategies for sustaining the socio-cultural values of local communities. In a country where so much knowledge is directly tied to rural regions, solutions for restoring them are becoming increasingly urgent. Critical regionalism is one framework for developing an argument for local cultures. Kenneth Frampton suggests that critical regionalism can be achieved by redirecting the attention from visual stimulus, propagated by the metropolis, back to the physicality and materiality of our environments. Life in cities is framed by similar built environments that serve as products of globalism, while rural life is characterized by the unique relationships a community has with local conditions. Through different combinations of educational, industrial and social programming, the projects of Islands and Villages and the Tané House find ways of allowing local life and culture to continue to develop despite the degrowth circumstances. In similar ways, the design projects of this thesis aim to highlight local relationships through different types of program. The programming of the re-inhabited schools explores different proportions of industrial/economic, cultural and social activities. 

The Ministry of Education has acknowledged the opportunities offered by vacant school buildings, and a number or re-use projects already exist and are underway. In 2010, the Haikō for the Future Project was launched as an effort to educate Japanese citizens on how the schools could be used in economically and socially beneficial ways. A publicly available document was created that provided examples of existing and potential re-use projects, as well as an online database identifying vacant schools that are safe and suitable for re-occupation. The document is routinely updated, providing photo documentation of each reported haikō, a local contact person, site data and written descriptions. 

While travelling in Japan, I visited a number of existing re-use projects, both in rural and urban locations. One particularly successful project was the Hota Road Station, a vacant elementary school renovated into a complex of restaurants, a farmer’s market, hotel and community spaces in the seaside village of Kyonan in Chiba Prefecture. The architectural interventions consisted of interior retrofitting, the addition of a semi-conditioned winter garden along one façade, and new cladding on the original gymnasium building which had been converted into a market. The amalgamation of a number of programs meant that people of different demographics were using the building. People from the community were visiting the building as part of a regular routine, shopping for groceries at the market and occupying the workspaces for various cultural classes (calligraphy, painting), and visitors on tour buses were occupying the restaurants and staying at the hotel. 

3331 Arts Chiyoda, is another a successful public space that has changed the atmosphere of a downtown Tokyo neighborhood. The building’s programs consist of artist studios, galleries, creative office space, a library and a café, and the ground floor is made entirely public. Many of the original walls of this level have been removed, and the original classroom furniture is distributed for flexible seating. It was unusual to see Tokyo salarymen lounging on school benches and watching YouTube videos at wooden desks while on their lunch breaks. Outside, people in corporate attire organized picnics on the grass and were lying in the hot sun. These examples of individual public expression were positive; however, each project was relatively minimal in its level of architectural intervention. In most cases, this is likely due to financial limitations, but some questions that emerged while documenting each case study were the possibilities and potential meanings of manipulating the school structures further. 

As mentioned earlier in the text, this design research positions itself in a time where many forces are at play in Japanese society. Values are shifting in terms of lifestyle, gender roles, family structures and economic growth. The schools themselves are in many ways representations of traditional values that have remained unchanged in Japan post World War II, and the re-use projects proposed in this thesis are considered as an opportunity to de-stabilize the political symbols embedded in the buildings. Degrowth prompts a shift in thinking in Japan, and the design projects explore how architecture can play a role in displaying that change to communities.