I hang around with a lot of urbanists, and pretty much all urbanists love mixed-use development — shops and restaurants coexisting alongside houses and apartments. But mixed-use development comes in different forms, and Japan does things a bit differently from most of the world’s large, dense cities.

In this post I’m going to distinguish between two types of mixed-use development. Shop-top development, which is common in dense cities all over the world, puts apartment buildings on top of restaurants and stores. Zakkyo buildings, which are a kind of development seen mostly in Japan, have stores on all the floors.