Kaiwai or a Pre-History of Pop-Up Cities
Pop-up cities and Tokyo
This is the first essay in a series about pop-up cities and other experiments in creating city states. You can read some of my previous writing on this theme here or here.
Citizenship
In June 2024 I was a citizen of Edge Esmeralda, a pop up city in Northern California. The city existed as a digital projection on the town of Healdsburg – There were very few physical artifacts that represented the city. The citizens occupied the underutilized off season wineries and restaurants, and they would have been indistinguishable from tourists if not for their distinct San Francisoco tech aesthetic. You navigated the territory of Esmeralda using apps like Social Layer and Zupass.
I spent most of my week there attempting to grok the idea of pop-up cities. They are different from conferences in that they are oriented around people spending two or more weeks there, and families are accommodated well. Your day-to-day is organized around a hybrid of activities that could feel like a conference, such as talks and meet-ups, or a summer camp (run clubs, treasure hunts, etc.). The city was porous, always changing, and only defined by activities happening within it.
At the end of the week, my understanding of pop-up cities was put to the test by a local reporter who caught me at breakfast and asked me to explain what I got out of attending Edge Esmeralda. I told her I enjoyed the spontaneity of meeting new people in a relaxed atmosphere – unlike the frenzy and immediate status games of a conference. A few minutes later, I overheard the reporter talk to another guy. I didn't catch full sentences, but the words he stressed, loud enough for me to hear, were "network state", "mainstream media," etc. I suspect he too was grokking at what a pop city meant. A few days later, I read the local reporter's piece, which simply said: Edge Esmeralda, much ado about nothing.
A month after I left, I saw that the co-organizer of Edge Esmeralda had acquired land to build the permanent city of Esmeralda in the same area,
In late October, I flew to Chiang Mai for Edge Lanna, another pop-up city organized by the same team. In the intervening months, pop-up cities had gained momentum in the discourse. More people were interested in this experiment so it should not have been surprising to me that Edge Lanna was one of seven pop-up cities in Chiang Mai at the time. The concept and organization had leveled up in complexity and organization.
Activity Space
If there is a city that knows a thing or two about being destroyed and regenerated over and over again, it is probably Tokyo. After the destruction of the Second World War, there was a demand in Tokyo to leave behind the feudal architecture of old Japan, which did not prioritize public spaces. Architects and planners lobbied for more Western-style plazas. The idealism of the plaza was that it would promote more highly aligned public participation and collective action in Tokyo. In his book Tokyo Vernacular, Jordan Sands writes that:
"In the same fashion, claims to space on the part of large groups of politically mobilized Tokyoites in the first two postwar decades were driven by the vision of a unified national public. Citizens protested in places they understood as public property, either because it had been granted to them by the state or because they treated it as their own by right as the citizens of a democratic polity. This meant that generally they gathered in structured and directed assemblies that expressed unitary political objectives rather than engaging in debate, discussion, and the "free traffic" of ideas."
The idealism around collective action in post-war Tokyo is reminiscent of post-pandemic conversations around finding community. Many probably remember the time when they could not go on twitter without seeing a pull quote from Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone or pictures of old European piazzas next to a Starbucks in Pittsburgh. These conversations were, at least in part, early inspiration for experiments around organizing people around qualitative goals like community, serendipity etc.
Sands goes on to write that the idealism of the plaza failed to take off in Tokyo and cites the failure of the Anpo protests in the early 1960s as the end of Tokyoite's attempts to recreate the western-style plaza that promised universal access and universal consensus. What then took its place was something more spontaneous and pragmatic.
While the Anpo protests failed and dispersed, it was successful in seeding magazines and zines that explored collective action and new theories around public space. In 1962, architect Ito Teiji along with others proposed the concept of Kaiwai as a way to understand Japanese spaces. In Kaiwai, Ito offered that the uniqueness of Japanese urban spaces lay in the ways in which ordinary people appropriated spaces and in spaces that lent themselves to appropriation.
To understand Kaiwai a bit better it is useful to look at traditional Japanese views around preservation and the idea of "place" itself in Japanese society. In the Book of Tea, an early essay about Japanese culture and aesthetics written for a Western audience, Okakura Kakuzō writes about the Shinto custom of rebuilding a home after the owner has passed away:
"The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant. Perhaps there may have been some unrealized sanitary reason for this practice. Another early custom was that a newly built house should be provided for each couple that married. It is on account of such customs that we find the Imperial capitals so frequently removed from one site to another in ancient days. The rebuilding, every twenty years, of Ise Temple, the supreme shrine of the Sun-Goddess, is an example of one of these ancient rites which still obtain at the present day. The observance of these customs was only possible with some form of construction as that furnished by our system of wooden architecture, easily pulled down, easily built up. A more lasting style, employing brick and stone, would have rendered migrations impracticable, as indeed they became when the more stable and massive wooden construction of China was adopted by us after the Nara period."
This cultural insistence on rebuilding and renewing can also be felt in Tokyo, where real estate leases in the city provide tenants with rights to rennovate and overall the building, and in public places that are being constantly updated. The plot sizes in Tokyo are by average quite small, which makes it easy to rebuild quite fast and without disruption to daily public life.
Tokyo appears to be a featureless gray city when you are on public transit whizzing past stations. Even at the street level there are no grand monuments or giant public squares that you can orient yourself around, but I also found it to be a place that encourages serendipity and interactions with strangers. A long walk through Tokyo enlightens you that Kaiwai is an emergent property of Japanese urban space and not one that it designed for top-down.
Kaiwai is a modern adaptation of the Japanese ideas around rebuilding and renewal, one that is applied to collective action in an urban environment.
Kaiwai sits somewhere between Warrens and Plazas. Plazas are legible spaces that are highly aligned and easy to navigate while Warrens are spaces that do not afford the same legibility and require more localized navigation. Kaiwai is a warren with a temporal dimension, coming into existence spontaneously and defined more by activities within the place than by its boundaries. While Sands provides examples to illustrate such as a protest at Shinjuku metro station, I think you can think of the whole of Tokyo (or at least large parts of it) as a place that is less attached to to public consensus and architecture and defined more so by the quality of activities within the place.
Pop-up cities are conceptually similar, an exit from rigid, highly aligned politiciking to something that is spontaneous, pragmatic and temporary. In a time when realities are fracturing and cannot be held together for an extended period of time, experiments such as Edge Lanna and Esmeralda are a temporary port of call for people to share ideas, be inspired and do bits. I think the next couple of years will show how complex these projects can get, and if they build a kaiwai like commons or go the way of great man monumentality.
