The image of Tokyo transmitted in Europe is completely different from the one you have living there. Thanks to the experience of participation to the professor Ariga Laboratory on Urban Planning, I discovered a dimension impossible to realize as a tourist. Behind the static and imposing skyscrapers, just at the shadows of these, Tokyo shelters a vibrant core of small traditional neighborhoods, and Komagome is part of those.

Again, as in the plan, the first element that caught me was the silence. Getting out from the metro station, dipping inside the neighborhood, the calmness and the poise pervading the streets made me falling in love of this "village". I started to spend as much time as 1 could in Komagome, discovering the habits of people, its hidden spaces, its colors and its perfumes. I was not really able to believe the human scale, the silence, the overspread plants and greens I had in front of my eyes. Especially thinking that five-minute far by metro there was Ikkebukuro, one of the neuralgic and most chaotic centers of Tokyo, and probably of the world.

My task in the Ariga Laboratory experience was to study public space with the aim of their possible regeneration. I was really enthusiastic about that topic. Hence I started to analyze the topic, clearly having my European cultural background. Little by little, going deeper in the analysis of the neighborhood public spaces and trying to extrapolate

the meaning of "public spaces" from the point of view of Komagome' people, I discovered that it was not possible to apply my background, grounded of European experiences, to a completely different model in term of way of thinking and living. The participatory processes played a fundamental role in the uprooting my background: listening to the needs expressed by the residents, taking part of the community workshops and working with my Japanese colleagues, brought me to a new and different perspective, where the Community needs were highlighted. What is a public space without a community, its value, its individual and collective needs? Is it possible to develop an idea of public space independently from the needs of the community? What the role of planners in offering a

top down supply of public spaces, for instance for the main infrastructure, and what the role of bottom-up processes based on the emerging needs of the community? Are those two dimensions linked or in contrast? What is the role of the architect in this complexity? How practically to define a guideline for planning public space in Komagome taking into consideration both the dimensions? The first one, for instance, coming by the necessity of respecting the national low on safety (top-down), and the second one rooted in the valorization of individual and community needs of the population?

Therefore, my research is not only an analysis of the small neighborhood of Komagome, but it is also a personal itinerary, as individual, and especially as a future architect.