Building a context for the city by accumulating “Small acts of participation”｜ ”Playable Week 2022” Report

JR East held the ”Playable Week 2022” event from March 2nd to 6th to commemorate the second anniversary of Takanawa Gateway Station’s opening on March 14th.

“Playable Week” is an event that allows visitors to experience the new city planning that JR East is promoting around Takanawa Gateway Station under the name of ”Takanawa Gateway City (tentative)”. The purpose of this event is to allow participants to experience and enjoy the activities and experiments that we have been working on with our co-creative partners firsthand, before the opening of the new city at the end of FY2024, and to have them imagine what the future city will look like under the slogan of ”testing ground for the rich lives of the people in the coming 100 years” and “a city where you can take on challenges”. Following last year’s first-ever ”Playable Week”, we have curated content that will give visitors a more concrete image of the new city, which is scheduled to officially open in three years, as well as its background.

The purpose of holding events even before the opening of Takanawa Gateway City (tentative) at the ”station”, a place that is an extension of our daily life, is to accumulate the ”context” and small acts of ” participation” in the city. And how do they link with the content of the event? Today, we will present to you the initiatives with our new co-creative partners that we did not have the time to introduce at the previous ”Playable Week”, as well as the voices of those in charge of each content. Atsumi, a member of the Takanawa Gateway City (tentative) Project, is here to tell you all about it.

Yuko Atsumi
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit, East Japan Railway Company. Atsumi is in charge of city branding and promotion for TokyoYard PROJECT.

Walking around the station underwater with “XR Sea”!

“Walking around the station underwater with XR Sea!” allows visitors to experience a virtual reality space where the station is under the sea by holding up their smartphones and launching the XR application ”SATCH X powered by STYLY”. The ”XR Sea” experience was created with the hope that the visitors will experience the history of the Takanawa Gateway Station area, which is located on a site that was once in the water, by overlaying memories of the past and the present with XR technology.

The ”XR Sea” experience is supported by technology developed by KDDI Corporation in cooperation with Psychic VR Lab Co.ltd, which overlays virtual content onto actual urban space using XR technologies such as 5G and VPS.

Together with KDDI, we are working on the ”Flexible Life Design Project” which aims for a new decentralized way of working and living. Our goal is to achieve a “human-driven decentralized city planning” that centers on people's lifestyles, rather than a hub-intensive city planning where people, goods, resources, energy, information, technology, and companies are all concentrated in urban areas.

JR East x KDDI's “Flexible Life Design Project” aiming to develop “human-driven” decentralized city planning
https://note.com/tokyoyard/n/nd7e3d46bdc14

To achieve this, we believe it is crucial to create spaces and mechanisms that integrate the ”real” (stations, cities, and transportation) and the ”virtual” (communications) to develop diverse ways of working and living that are not limited by location or time. The communication network technology developed by KDDI can create a new value for a city that cannot be achieved by the physical network of the JR East alone. And this is the very reason why we decided to collaborate with KDDI. And as for “XR Sea” that we have co-created with KDDI, its concept was to propose a new experience utilizing XR at a “real” station.

Aki Hayakawa
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit, East Japan Railway Company. Hayakawa is in charge of the Flexible Life Design Project in collaboration with KDDI.

“We put together this content based on the concept of utilizing the technology we are working on with our co-creative partner, KDDI, to let people feel the memory of the past and the present state of the Takanawa sea. As we approach the opening of the city to come in a few years, we feel that the content of the event and the image of what we hope to implement after the opening of the city are gradually coming closer together. By continuing to create contact with the partners, residents, and visitors, we hope that they will experience the “change” in the way they perceive the city and look forward to the opening even more.”

Experiencing evacuation assistance with ”Disaster Prevention Help Service”

To conduct a demonstration test of evacuation assistance in the event of a Tokyo inland earthquake, we have held the ”Evacuation assistance experience using the Disaster Prevention Help Service”, an event that utilizes the evacuation assistance system of the same name developed by Pasona Tech, Inc. The service matches people who need assistance with transportation in the event of a disaster (people requiring support) with people in the community who wish to assist it (mobile supporters). In addition to the visitors, children living in the neighborhood and members of community association were also invited to participate in the event to help increase their awareness of disaster prevention through exposure to local disaster prevention information.

On the day of the event, we allowed participants to charge their smartphones at an outdoor charging station (provided by BELLDESIGN Inc.) powered by renewable energy and wireless power supply technology, which is being installed at the Takanawa Gateway Station for a limited time only. Then the mobile supporters met up with people who were matched by the ”Disaster Prevention Help Service” app and experienced a series of steps to reach the evacuation shelter.

Disaster prevention is one of the most important aspects of assuring the safety and security of the new city. Disaster prevention is not something that can be solved solely by the city's infrastructure functions (hardware) alone, but it can be achieved only when combined with the disaster awareness of each individual and the supporting mechanisms (software). Evacuation drills tend to be formal due to their nature, so it is very important to create many opportunities for people to enjoy participating in such drills and to raise their awareness of disaster prevention as an extension of their daily lives, as in the case of this evacuation support experience. We would like to continue such disaster prevention activities before the opening of the city while applying the knowledge and assets of our partner, Pasona Tech.

Arata Ohashi
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit, East Japan Railway Company. Ohashi is in charge of preparatory work for the opening of the new city, and of examining ICT-based services.

“The new city will create a new flow of people, which means that a robust and highly practical disaster prevention network must be fostered not only through the hardware and management of facilities and cooperation with the government, but also through the disaster prevention awareness of residents and a mutual aid system. We need to consider the ways we implement disaster prevention and mutual aid mechanisms in normal times, utilize the power of ICT, and make “safety and security” ubiquitous. To realize this, we would like to continuously sow the seeds for future at these events and in the day-to-day activities of the Takanawa Gateway City (tentative) planning.”

“JAL xR Traveler -Aomori Edition-” Experience

The ”JAL xR Traveler -Aomori Edition-” is a next-generation VR experience that uses not only images and sound but also breeze and scent to create a more realistic simulation. Japan Airlines Co., Ltd. (hereinafter JAL) and JR East collaborated to produce the first domestic edition of its series ”Aomori” and JAL flight attendants from the prefecture introduced its new attractions to visitors.

As the name of Takanawa Gateway Station suggests, Takanawa Gateway City (tentative) aims to make the Shinagawa/Takanawa area, which is located near Haneda Airport, a gateway to the rest of the world and a base for international exchange to solve business, cultural, and social issues. The people who live and work in the area will be surrounded by more diverse values and opportunities. The ways of solving social issues will be mutually beneficial to both the local community and the rest of the world. JAL's ”aerial network” takes on a major significance in the search for such a concept of the city that is connected to the rest of the world and able to circulate in harmony.

Solving “Local Issues” that exist worldwide - Report on demonstration experiments of Drone and Green Slow Mobility
https://note.com/tokyoyard/n/nbe3fa11555f0

JAL and JR East are both transportation providers and can be viewed as competitors. However, we believe that it is of utmost importance to provide opportunities for affluent lifestyles in countless cities and regions where the new city is connected by making use of their respective railway and aerial networks, and transcending their boundaries at the same time.

Kentaro Higuchi
Shinagawa Life Style Promotion Unit, East Japan Railway Company. Higuchi is in charge of planning and managing events to promote local attractions and cooperation with neighboring schools.

“I believe it is important to have not only railroads but also airlines and other various choices of transportation in our daily lives. We do not want the city to complete itself only with station/railroads, but rather make it a place that is open to the public for different opportunities. That is what we are aiming for. Even amid a pandemic, when the value of physical travel is being questioned, we hope to create more tangible regional and even international attractions by combining actual world and digital technology across business domains.”

In addition to these events, ”Bringing drones closer to your life! Toy drone experience and demonstration videos”, ”Futuristic workshops with the theme of city planning”, and the ongoing ”Takanawa Gateway Station area scenery exhibition”, ”Station illustration coloring session,” and ”Takanawa Gateway Marché” were also held during the Playable Week.

Why do we hold these events at the ”station”, an extension of our daily life?

One of the major characteristics of Takanawa Gateway City (tentative) that separates from other city planning is that the station has already opened before the opening of the city, where various initiatives have already begun such as collaborations among our partners and demonstration experiments. If we just build a large facility for now and say, ”Well, let’s start something”, we will not be able to create truly comfortable lifestyles or cultures.

Were the demonstration experiments and initiatives that we have conducted with our co-creative partners to date significant for overcoming legal hurdles, feasibility, and issues? And were they something really necessary for the residents? And if so, what is expected of us? The essential significance is in identifying these “voices” through these processes. It’s too late if our attitude toward city planning is ”starting after opening”.

Furthermore, the significance of conducting these experiments and events such as ”Playable Week 2022” before the opening of the city is to keep on weaving the ”context of the city”.

We hope that the elderly participant in the Green Slow Mobility demonstration experiment may come to understand the city with a deeper insight after the opening of the event and say, ”Oh, so that's what it was all about”. Participants in this event may be able to see the city after the official opening and relate to the context rather than seeing it solely as ”novelty technology/services”. Such engagement with the context of the city and the creation of contacts is the major significance of conducting demonstration experiments and events before the opening of the city.

By continuously accumulating these small engagements in the extension of daily life, we can create the context of the city. A ”station” is a place that is open to anyone and integrated into daily life, where even those who are not interested in city planning or events can come together. In this sense, an event at a station has a different connotation for us than a one-time big promotional event.

For this ”Playable Week 2022,” the number of walk-up participants exceeded the number of those who made reservations in advance. We hope to gradually build on these small acts of participation as an extension of daily life while increasing the number of companies, communities, and visitor partners that get involved. As a result, we hope to make ”Playable Week” a place not only for a corporate partner but also a place for diverse experiments to realize individual ideas.

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