21st Century (2000–present)

Tokyo Roppongi Hills Masterplan

2003 · Japan · East Asia – Japan · Megastructure, systems planning, and techno-utopian urbanism · Planned by Mori Building

Roppongi Hills within the Minato City skyline, Tokyo. · CC BY-SA

Core idea

Vertical mixed-use city within a city

Why it matters

Prototype of private-led integrated urbanism

Description

Roppongi Hills, completed in 2003 by the private developer Mori Building after a land-assembly process lasting some seventeen years, is a dense mixed-use complex in central Tokyo organised around the Mori Tower. The masterplan stacked offices, housing, a hotel, cinema, museum and broadcast studios into an integrated vertical quarter with layered public spaces and gardens, promoted by its developer as a 'city within a city' where people could live, work and play without commuting.

Significance

Roppongi Hills became the prototype of large-scale, privately led integrated urban development in Japan and was widely studied across Asia as a model of vertical, mixed-use intensification. It gave concrete form to ideas of the compact 'vertical garden city' descended from megastructural thinking, while also fuelling debate about privately owned public space and the role of single developers in shaping central Tokyo.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →

hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.