One relationship, one neighborhood at a time. In many ways, we strangers experience today’s Tokyo as the dream city of metabolism: networked and cosmopolitan, efficient and polite, caring and tolerant. This dream experience has a history. According to Koh Kityama, professor of architecture and leading authority on Tokyo’s metabolism, Tokyo is a city shaped by catastrophe from above and below, within and without: earthquakes, firebombs, economic “miracles,” and tsunami.[1] In reaction to such devastation, the 1960s saw the development of Metabolism as a crossdisciplinary design principle: anticipate inevitable destruction by humbling the city—each structure avoids direct conflict with fate by digesting itself every 26 years, before the next tsunami does.  Arm by disarming, by opening the inside to the outside. Do not build walls…