Small vehicles of Tokyo. A slim cataloguing of the rich… | by Dan Hill | A ch... - 0 views
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[pop-up] urbain on 17 Aug 21"I've written enough about walking around the city's neighbourhoods (Ed. Really?) What follows is a quick sampling of a hugely diverse range of small vehicles-the tip of the tip of the iceberg-that also contribute to the quality of the city's streets. I'll no doubt update it with each subsequent trip I take. It's like a version of Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, but with an emphasis on the Things That Go rather than the Cars and Trucks. And set in Tokyo. Imagine the drivers as tanuki rather than cats and dogs. When visiting Tokyo, if you are attuned to eating the world with your eyes and particularly the layers of urban life bigger than a cellphone and smaller than a building, one of the first things you'll notice is how comparatively small the vehicles seem to be. Then, the sheer variety of these small vehicles. And then, how these vehicles, by virtue of their humble and appropriate scale and speed, help produce the city's often delightfully humane streets. And then finally, that these small vehicles are scurrying around the world's largest city. By way of comparison, the municipal and commercial vehicles blasting around Manhattan, for example, are more like hulking tanks, built for battle, apparently ready to face off against the army of gargantuan SUVs contesting the same spaces. But in Tokyo, a city three times larger, the small scale of the vehicles makes instinctive sense. I've written before about how Tokyo is actually defined by smallness and slowness, drawing from the great work of Keio University's Darko Radovic and Davisi Boontharm, amongst others."