CITYSET
Collaborators: Kai Ohlarik
Site: Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
ARC500 Tokyo Design Studio
Fall 2025
Instructor: Bing Bu
The proposal envisions a future in which private railway corporations expand their influence beyond transportation and become the primary architects of urban growth. Inspired by the existing development practices of companies such as Tokyu, JR East, and Keio, new supertall mixed-use towers emerge around Shibuya Crossing as destinations in themselves. These developments contain hotels, observation decks, shopping complexes, entertainment venues, rooftop gardens, and cultural attractions designed to capture an ever-growing tourist population. As international tourism intensifies, Shibuya gradually transforms into a resort-like urban environment where the city itself becomes a curated attraction.
At the center of the proposal is a new planning rule requiring major developments to contribute publicly accessible skybridges that connect elevated public spaces between buildings. While framed as an investment in accessibility and circulation, these aerial pathways become instruments of competition between developers. Each railway company strategically uses skybridges to redirect pedestrian movement through its own properties, transforming circulation into a commodity and connectivity into a source of economic value. Elevated walkways, observation platforms, and commercial corridors create a second city above the street, where tourists move through a carefully choreographed sequence of views, retail experiences, and landmarks.
The resulting urban condition is organized into distinct vertical layers. At street level, visitors encounter a dense environment of storefronts, advertisements, souvenir vendors, and transportation infrastructure. Above, a network of skybridges and public decks creates a continuous tourist realm suspended between towers. Rooftop gardens, observation terraces, and vertical parks provide moments of spectacle within an increasingly commercialized skyline. Beneath the surface, transit systems continue to support the immense flows of people that sustain the district. Together, these layers form a three-dimensional city where movement, consumption, and redevelopment are inseparable.
Through a series of panoramic vignettes depicting morning, afternoon, evening, and late-night conditions, CITYSET examines how different populations occupy this evolving environment. Tourists become the primary performers within the elevated network, moving between attractions and commercial destinations. Influencers transform public space into a stage for digital production and self-promotion. Developers and city officials monitor the success of redevelopment projects from the upper levels of the new towers. Meanwhile, local residents and commuters increasingly navigate side streets, alleyways, and residual spaces, becoming peripheral figures within a city increasingly designed around visitor experience.
Rather than presenting a dystopian future, CITYSET explores the subtle consequences of contemporary development trends already visible within Tokyo today. It asks how infrastructure, tourism, and private investment may reshape urban life when growth itself becomes a form of spectacle. By projecting existing redevelopment logics forward, the project envisions Shibuya as a continuously evolving urban stage, an environment where architecture not only accommodates movement but actively choreographs it, where redevelopment becomes the city’s defining identity, and where the boundary between public space and commercial experience grows increasingly indistinct.
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