"Tokyo - City of Breathing Gaps" - Narratives on dynamic human movement in small urban spaces of everyday

The city is the built expression of our cultural values and is seen as a complex patterning of activity. Small urban places are a dynamic, rapidly alterable milieu of people, information, and composition, indispensably related to time. Furthermore, the city is used by people: everyday routines, urban rituals, sociospatial movements and pattern of interaction give meaning to the city. We make the city by living (in) the city. Gap spaces between buildings exists in all cities, but especially in Tokyo where the city is rebuild continously. The scale of such spaces varies from (1) narrow back street (roji),(2) leftover land strips ‘in-between’ existing areas and behind new urban projects and (3) cracks and gaps in between building . In order to understand how the small-scale gap spaces affect the urban pattern of the city, the paper examine different characteristics of spaces of in-between: episodic, wandering, individual and traditional rooted structures. This paper will focus on the small urban places which remain between the cyclical changing city scape, between low and high rise and as a product of spontaneous, unplanned urban restructuring. Walking these small urban places one can get engaged with local urban cultures and their everyday life. The socio-spatial transformations add to the vitality of a place by constantly unfolding, changing and modifying the existing urban fabric of the ‘global’ city. We can say that the ephemeral quality of the gap is influenced by the diversity of place and time which is just one of many partnerships in the city.