Borderless Community Unique in the World
Tokyu Land and KMD “Takeshiba Project”
A team led by Professor Ichiya Nakamura is working on the “Takeshiba Project” with Tokyu Land and Kajima Corporation, the companies that have entered into a 70-year lease for land owned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in the Takeshiba, Minato-ku area of Tokyo. The project is part of a larger program dealing with land-use in Tokyo called “Urban Renewal Upgrade Project (Takeshiba District)”. The plan is to create a center for international business focusing on the Japanese content industry, and use it as a platform for better communicating and interacting with other countries.
The “Contents innovation Program Council” (CiP Council) responsible for formulating and implementing the project held its first planning session in June 2014. Five KMD Master’s students, working under the guidance of Professor Nakamura to build a new platform for urban development, were involved in creating the organization and managing the research and development. Group Leader Atsunori Tanaka from the Urban Development Division at Tokyu Land praised them highly, saying, “They had an extremely high level of drive and were able to move from the Council preparations phase through detailed planning and on to implementation.”
The CiP Council’s plan is to begin in April 2015 to create “a place unique in the world” in Takeshiba, a home for the entire span of the content industry, from research and development to human resources development, entrepre- neurial support, and business-matchmaking. In addition to providing office space, commercial facilities, serviced apartments, and room-shares, the project will bring in the surrounding neighborhoods to create a “borderless” community.
As a research and development institution, KMD will serve as the hub and will investigate a number of topics such as “superhuman sports,” “IT policy,” and “the digital signage of the next generation.”
The Real Project led by Professor Nakamura commits to creating a new business center in Japan that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. The building is scheduled for completion in 2020. The area will also host pre-event activi- ties in conjunction with the Tokyo Olympics.
“KMD is not a place where you are taught, it is a place where you learn and build. You are in a situation where you are working with people in the business world, industry and government to create the next new thing, and, through this experience, you hone your skills. You can develop all the plans you want in your head, but they mean nothing if they are not implemented. We focus on the idea of‘imagine and realize.’ It’s the ability to bring things through to completion that’s important,” says Professor Nakamura.
(This article was written in March 2015.)
A number of topics such as “Next-Generation Digital Signage” will be investigated.
Atsunori Tanaka of Tokyu Land’s Urban Development Division