Quote:
Originally Posted by RumbleFish
I find this hard to believe
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I'm not sure I'd agree, but I can see where he's coming from. It really depends on
how one experiences each city.
You really get a sense of Tokyo's scale when you're seeing its endless urbanity pass by from the window of a high speed train, but there are few specific areas where that same feeling is palpable. It has some extreme points of activity (Shibuya Crossing > Times Square), but they drop off pretty quickly. Given its size, it can be quite orderly and serene.
Tokyo's vastness is expressed more in its sheer number of such areas than it is in the feeling of overbearing urbanity in any one of them. There's no particular area that has the same level of concentrated urbanity as Manhattan does - few places in the world
do have such a high level of built density over such a large area.
We also all have our own biases that inform how we perceive things like the feeling of "bigness" of a place as well. Like for me, chunky old brick buildings = city. And New York has a lot of those. It wouldn't feel as big as it does if all those old tenements were replaced by towers in the park of equivalent density, for example. And for some, unfamiliarity or foreignness can make a place feel impenetrable and large. For others, it's the presence of things like skyscrapers or infrastructure. For some its density, while for others its endless sprawl that does it. There are many features of cities that convey a different sense of scale to different people.