Toshima
From Ikebukuro to Asahigaoka
The Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area is the undisputed largest urban area in the world. Spanning four prefectures It is home to roughly 40 million people which equates to 30% of the entire country's population.
Toshima-Ku (豊島区) is one of the larger areas in Tokyo and is the focus of this map, Toshima is internationally known for its abundance of Shopping districts, museums, and historic temples.
Ikebukoro is the centre of Toshima. Ikebukoro station services around 2.5 million passengers a day. Around the station there are large commercial centres and the famous Sunshine city aquarium
In Ikebukoro there are many Shotengai (商店街), Shotengai are streets that focus on facilitating small business's, Shotengai can be found all over Japan, we even have them in my rural home in Okinawa!
This image was taken close the previous one, Japan has very loose zoning laws allowing for districts to naturally pop up, this leads to interesting areas such as this little mini-shrine!
Do to these lacks laws Toshima has an abundance of large, well kept and beautiful parks right in the city centre! It is important for the mental and physical health of citizens to have large and very green parks in urban areas.
As you can see with beautiful parks like these you can often forget that you are even in a city :)
Bellow are the images I used and edited in lightroom. I have never used lightroom before so i don't think my Images were so good. For the images with more green i tried to add heavy shadows and really bring out the colours. for more urban centric images i tried to make them less colourful and more drab and depressing because i thought it'd be interesting. But I hope that my park images will make people want to go to parks more often because you really should go to green parks :)
