Saturday, June 23, 2012

[jules' pics] Bladerunner-ville

Sadly favoured by organisers of climate conferences, Tsukuba is designed to be mind numbingly dull, but Tachikawa - whence commeth the mathematicians - is in a whole different league. It is so horrible it is kind of fascinating. More than just the usual Tokyo disarray caused by a lack of housing regulation, this is clearly deliberate. I wonder what went through the minds of the town planners. The feet of the Tachikawan's rarely touch the ground, which makes me think of flying cars and Bladerunner.

monorail - and those pedestrians are still several floors above terra firma...
Tachikawa


grotesque underground mural - but at least people can escape into their phones...
Tachikawa


endless overpasses
Tachikawa
Could have spent hours taking photos there but, as usual, James led the way home, and there was only time for a few snaps.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 6/23/2012 09:00:00 PM

13 comments:

Ron Broberg said...

Ran many a mile around the old Tachikawa air base learning to deal with the humidity. Spent some istening to the young musicians on the skyways. Eating yakitori and anything else the proprietor would throw at me in return for my horrid Japanese in a working class diner with a baseball theme. Tachikawa treated me all right.

Steve said...

The fact that parts of Japan look like futuristic visions of elevated walkways and monorails and speeding trains is part of its appeal. So we don't need the whole world to look that way, but I don't mind at all that some of it does.

Steve said...

That said, it does amaze me that all this elevated stuff is in a city expecting a huge earthquake some day.

crf said...

Is it hard to tell the replicants from the real people?

James Annan said...

Ah, so that's the large unused green site that we were right beside. Perhaps it will be gradually reclaimed for development...

James Annan said...

Are there any real people left still?

jules said...

Steve - its not futuristic! That's my point - It looks like an early 1980s vision of the future.

Personally I wouldn't want to live there but wouldn't at all mind more visits - unlike Tsukuba I

Steve said...

Jules, I'm a little confused: how is the future supposed to look now? I'm still stuck in the 1980's, obviously.

chris said...

Do you remember the old future (1970-1980's vision) where advances in science and technology would lead to dramatic reductions in work hours such that the main concerns were about how we might occupy the long lazy hours of leisure time?

Here we are in that future (or at least much closer to it), and yet we're all having to work ever harder and to an older age. In fact with the creeping increase in wealth and income disparities, and the relentless redistribution of wealth and power to the corporate sector, our advance towards the future seems more like a return to the pre WW1 era (for us in the old economies anyhow).

Please can I have my future back..

David B. Benson said...

What in the world were you doing constorting with mathematicians?

James Annan said...

consorting with? she married one!

Ron Broberg said...

Zeerust: the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic.

skanky said...

Aren't the walkways supposed to eventually become the waterside promenades?