To the first-time Western visitor the Japanese city often appears chaotic and baffling -- even intimidating. In this new edition, Barrie Shelton develops his earlier interpretation of why Japanese cities look the way they do, contrasting Japanese and Western ways of thinking about space. Placing less emphasis on the correlation, or 'meeting', between Japanese urban form and recent Western-generated urban design theory, he looks more on Japanese urban design models as worthy of 'translation'. New illustrations and updated text add much to this highly readable book, while a major case study of Nagoya -- a city in which the various components and characteristics highlighted in the book come together -- gives an entirely new dimension.
