2023 Volume 10 Pages 94-120
In North America, Transit-Oriented Development rose as part of New Urbanism, a reformist urban design movement, whereas in Japan, TOD has been developed in an engineering-influenced tradition of planning. As a comparative planning history between the two regions has not been articulated, this study aims to fill this gap by asking: How did the idea of TOD evolve in the Anglosphere and Japan? When and how their practices and pursuits diverged? How does this investigation implicate TOD in global context, including that in the growing global south? By tracing the planning history from the railway suburb, the garden city, the new town move moment, the era of urban reform, and the global spread of TOD, this article identifies, in contrast to TOD in New Urbanism, Japanese TOD is rooted in a more pragmatist and modernist approach from its westward communication and local development. Both practices emphasized a synthetical transformation of land use, city form and transportation for social purposes, but these pursuits were sometimes asymmetrically achieved in history. Nowadays, when theories of land use, city form and social equity waned in the globalizing TOD concept, we argued TOD should adhere to their tensions and debates for approaching the common good.
