Visiting Workshop｜ (re)DISCOVER YOKOHAMA Season01

“I wonder if the foghorn sounds without fog”.
‘Light My Fire, Who Put Out?’ (1983) Izumi Suzuki, novelist

“Invisible city-making that citizen involved is more important than the visible urban design… Urban design is only for the future”
‘Making a City of Yokohama’ (1983) Akira Tamura, urban planner

The workshop program aimed for making visible the images of the city of Yokohama and studying how the media represented them such as in films, animes, literatures and mangas overlaying the Six Spine Urban Projects in Yokohama though it is hard to see them at a glance, having interdisciplinary interaction and sharing sensibility.
With participants in different positions came from outside and inside, taking things we found in four times of pre-sessions like researches of landscape and history of the city started in August, we brought them into the main venue comparing the reality and media, the expressions were presented for two days.

Leaving each work’s ambiguity without analyzing and judging, we all just looked at them and discussed how we felt. At that point, we recognised there’re some features like ‘two characters of the front (bay area) and the back (area along Ohoka-gawa River)’, ‘city with hills’，’personality of fascination and danger’, ‘many symbols’, ‘mixed’ and, ‘prospect of (near) future’ in the City of Yokohama. We actually had a positive comment from the visitor that it is clear that the workshop is approaching to represent the comparison the image of Yokohama with in the media and in the reality as well as one we expected for how Yokohama should look like from outsider.

We appreciate the local citizen’s organisation in action who gave us the valuable advices and information. There might be the possibilities to discover something new if we could look at ‘drawn images of Yokohama’ as cultural resources from the view of urban situation to apply them for the future and also to know more about the past.

The project was actually held as one program in the Urban Planning Conference in Yokohama 2017 but we realised the significance of the program should be followed then it eventually continued as an individual event as Visiting Workshop: (re)DISCOVER YOKOHAMA Season02 in 2018.

Expressions by Tomoko Shoji, Masao Yonehara, Hiroshi Yanagihara, Namio Ohmichi, Madoka Nemugaki, Masumi Nakashima, Takashi Kume, Erina Mori, Takeshi Mazda, Hiroshi Nagayama, students from Yokohama City (Shiritsu) University, Yokohama
National (Kokuritsu ) University and others.
Produced by Keiichi Ogata

Supported by
The Japan Society of Urban and Regional Planners