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This post was originally a thread on X, but a lot of people liked it, so I thought I should redo it for my blog. It’s about Japanese cities — and in particular, about one special kind of Japanese retail space that most other countries lack.
I hang around with a lot of urbanists, and pretty much all urbanists love mixed-use development — shops and restaurants coexisting alongside houses and apartments. But mixed-use development comes in different forms, and Japan does things a bit differently from most of the world’s large, dense cities.
In this post I’m going to distinguish between two types of mixed-use development. Shop-top development, which is common in dense cities all over the world, puts apartment buildings on top of restaurants and stores. Zakkyo buildings, which are a kind of development seen mostly in Japan, have stores on all the floors.
My argument, basically, is that zakkyo buildings are at least partly responsible for many of the features that make Japanese cities such a consumer paradise. But before I lay out that case, I want to show some pictures that demonstrate how the rest of the world currently approaches urban retail.
Shop-top development: apartments above shops
Most of the mixed-use development in downtowns around the world feature shops and restaurants on the first floor, with apartments (or, sometimes, offices) on the floors above. This is called “shop-top” or “over-store” housing, and it has basically become the standard version of mixed-use development for dense, built-up areas.
Shop-top housing is extremely common in New York City. Here’s an example from Little Italy in NYC — you can see the storefronts on the ground level, with apartment windows above:
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Here’s the iconic neighborhood of Greenwich Village. It shows exactly the same pattern:
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Shop-top development is also the norm in my city of San Francisco:
It isn’t just the U.S., though. Here’s the Marais neighborhood in Paris:
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And here’s the Rue Montorgueil:
In both of these, you can clearly see that the shops are on the ground floor, and the upper floors are apartments (or, in some cases, possibly offices).
Here’s London:
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Here’s Istanbul:
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