Jōkamachi spatial system

Japanese culture remarks many times, in almost all of its traits, the concept of emptiness.

The meaning of this notion is rooted, in terms of traditional culture, in all the aspects of their life behavior. It comes out quietly from any kind of context related to their heritage and knowledge, handed down through a sign language expression, from writing, music and traditional cooking to spiritual consciousness, sense of proportions and almost all forms of art. In fact, if also represents a sort of unit measure that comprehend both space and time together and stands as a basic principle of practically everything.

Especially in Japanese idioma, every sign could inlcude at the same time, in itself or also in combination with other characters, different meanings belonging to the same ideographic system. This thesis takes its steps from this theorical concepts.

Considering a dynamic and circular relation between outside and inside, that characterizes Japanese living culture, transition seems to be the most appropriate word to describe as well the urban spatiality in the land of the rising sun as a pure constitutive dimension. Nervertheless, this issue can be read and associated, through history, from the space related to the typical house until the urban scale morphology developement.

Starting from the analysis of the term ma in all its diverse but, at the same time, close significances of pause, interval, between, ; room and so forth, in many different fields, the path ends with the categorization of the jokamachi, the Japanese castle towns, in different groups, according to their urban pattern. They represent a sort of a urban ma, not so much with regard to urban development over time but instead according to spatial development from which the Japanese city took shape.

Although the birth and the subsequent growth of the Japanese city takes its origin from the structure grid of the Chinese city, a parallelism and a time comparison with the western world can take place considering its uniqueness anomaly, in the Asian region, about its historiographical category and ca¬pitalistic evolution during Middle Ages.

Heijokyo, renamed after Nara, was the first "fixed" capital (710 - 794) of the Japanese history. It is actually a case of a urban traslatio from the Chinese capital Chang'an. In fact, the first Japanese capital is also called the first "chinese" capital of Japan.

Kamakura, a city in Kanagawa Prefecture, about 50 kilometers south-west of Tokyo, home of the first shogun goverment and city symbol of medieval Japan, represents a turning point. A sort of a urban rebellion, compared to the rigid grid imported from the continent, which will anticipate the future developemets of urbanism, invoking, on an urban scale, a native pattern.