In this reflection, you’ll hear from a delegate on lessons learned from the Tokyo Study Trip.

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By Gabo Halili

Entire apartments at Tokyo’s UR Housing Museum are rebuilt like time capsules: tatami mats(1) are carefully preserved, postwar floor plans are recreated, even doorbells and outlets are displayed so visitors can hear and touch the details of daily life. Alongside the museum, Star House towers stand as protected landmarks, symbols of a housing vision once central to Japan’s middle-class dream. In Japan, public housing is revered as both cultural heritage and civic achievement.

The contrast to New York City is stark. Public housing provides homes for one in seventeen New Yorkers, yet it reels from decades of neglect and underinvestment, with a capital repair backlog estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

That difference is significant. Housing design, planning, and policy are never neutral. They are acts of care that shape how people live, work, and connect with their communities.

The UR Housing Museum demonstrates how deeply care can be embedded in architecture. Entire complexes of danchi buildings – Japan’s postwar public housing – are reconstructed inside, showing how modern layouts and modest amenities transformed family life in the period after World War II. These apartments were experiments in reimagining family life: shifting kitchens to the center, adding private bedrooms, and surrounding residents with shared courtyards. In Tokyo, this history is not hidden or dismissed as outdated. It is preserved, honored, and presented as part of a shared civic memory.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tenjincho Place, a contemporary market-rate development on a narrow infill site, reveals care as a baseline expectation. From the outside, the building is unassuming, yet the entry opens into a canyon-like courtyard where every unit has light, air, and a balcony. It delivers generosity within the city. Together, the museum and Tenjincho show that in Tokyo, whether housing is public or private, historic or new, design carries an ethic of care.

This ethic of care extends beyond individual buildings to how Tokyo approaches neighborhood change. In New York, large projects often rely on eminent domain, taking land from existing residents. In Tokyo, redevelopment uses land readjustment – reorganizing parcels so residents become investors in new development.(3) They may relocate temporarily but typically return to improved homes with upgraded infrastructure. This practice transforms the dynamic between people, government, and developers. It embodies care at the institutional level by ensuring continuity of community, preserving ownership, and sharing in the benefits of change.

Beyond buildings and policy, I noticed care in the smallest details of daily life. In Tokyo, cheap clear umbrellas circulate through an informal sharing system: left in public places, picked up when needed, and returned later. These are ordinary habits that reveal a culture where individuals accept responsibility for the collective environment, a quiet ethic of community care woven into the city itself.

Experiencing Tokyo left me with a clear impression. Care there is not an exception but an expectation. As a designer and planner, this affirmed my belief: design and planning are acts of stewardship. The challenge in New York is fighting for that same ethic, treating housing as a civic responsibility we choose to champion.

Read more delegate reflections from Tokyo →

(1) Straw matting used as a floor covering in a Japanese home
(2) A Y-shaped apartment building introduced in the 1950s that can be found in many Tokyo public housing complexes
(3) The land readjustment measure was introduced in Japan’s first City Planning Act in 1919. It has since produced more than a third of the entire built environment in Japan