Redeveloping the Shibuya terminal on land freed by putting the railway underground (2012)

The single point where “running track and land as one” bore fruit

This run of redevelopment can be seen as the decision that concentrated onto one downtown point — Shibuya — the type Tokyu has pursued since it founded the Meguro-Kamata Electric Railway in 1922: “lay track and earn from the land along the line.” In the Tama Hills, it ran a railway across still-empty slopes and recouped its investment by selling the housing lots created through land readjustment. In Shibuya, the reverse: it sends underground the tracks that had already become an artery, and turns the railway land vacated above ground into real estate of its own, to hold for the long term. In this one sees the shift from a development that spreads outward across an area to a development that digs deep into a prime downtown site.

The technique of turning former railway land into floor space that generates rent overlaps with the move by private railways — facing inter-city competition and a ceiling on line-side population — to seek earners outside the railway. The concentrated investment in Shibuya also matched the organizational remaking of 2019, when the rail business was hived off as Tokyu Railways and the parent recast as a holding company over real estate and life-services. That said, the value of the floor space it holds depends on the demand of the firms that occupy it, and is not free of the questions of spreading remote work and office vacancy. What Shibuya’s “once-in-a-century” remaking leaves behind will be measured in how it is used over the next ten years.