Pleasantly Tokyolike but planners will want it to be quite a bit bigger. Less a flowerbed, more a mini park. Stone seating is a nice touch though. Open space a search term if you want to see representative pictures.

My favorite versions of it are the ones which aren’t just designed as a place you can transit through quickly on foot while seeing a splash of greenery but that invite you to stay a minute.

There’s a regulatory regime which gives you credit against how much of a parcel you allocate for this and lets you get effectively a concession on some other calculations, with the net effect of making it economical for developers to sacrifice some square footage on ground and…

… thereby get more in the air. You’re required, as part of that regime, to put a tasteful little plaque outside informing the people of Tokyo what areas you have ceded to their use. (This is separate, AFAIK, from ~ “ceded to the people of Tokyo by ancient practice.”)

Anyhow, attending real estate closings in Japan is fun and educational, though you’ll be discouraged a bit from asking for a full explanation of the sentence they’re legally required to read aloud in the middle of 200 similar pages. But it’s a beautiful sentence nonetheless.

Anyhow: we can choose to have nice things.