Cities worldwide are urgently moving towards a more resilient and sustainable future. On this quest, national, regional, and local governments apply a combination of socio-spatial tools that regenerate and transform the city’s leftover spaces. There is an abundance of community gardens, cultural centers, and large-scale urban developments that, through programmed activities, reactivate underused spaces. The bearers of this process are professionals and individuals who have become aware of their actions in the contemporary urban landscape. This paper highlights possible design strategies that domesticate leftover spaces of diverse scales by injecting creative and playful programs, using Tokyo as a paradigmatic case study. More so than other global metropolises, the city represents a living laboratory for experimentation due to its compactness and the variety of urban patterns. Its leftover spaces demonstrate how play positively affects everyday life in public spaces, and how it enables extraordinary uses. A combination of ethnographic observations and spatial analysis is applied as a trans-disciplinary method. This approach allows an understanding of how people use playfulness to transform, appropriate, and utilize leftover spaces, which serves as guidance for urban planners and designers.

In highly industrialized and institutionalized societies aiming for maximum efficiency, individual activities must be synchronized with the daily rhythms of a city. As a spatial and institutional realm, the city imposes on people and influences their level of attachment, consequently altering their sense of home. This is most obvious in contemporary cities, where daily life involves movement, and where rest is often sought outside the living place, while on the move. By examining the spatial and temporal aspects of mobility of young Tokyo residents, this article explores how their sense of home and levels of attachment to the physical environment are affected by the city. It reveals a dynamic sense of home in which routes are more significant than roots and in which attachment is not restricted to a single location. Instead, it is understood as attachment to temporal and spatial relationships produced by the activities of people and institutions.

This article explores the multidimensional concept of home through the relationship of the self and the city. The case study is Tokyo, and sense of home and homelike activities of its young dwellers are explored, analyzed, and discussed within the integrated unity of their spatial, sociocultural, and psychological/temporal properties. Semistructured interviews were conducted in order to grasp the rhythm and the dynamics of the daily lives of the respondents and to recognize significant places in the city where homelike activities happen. As a result, a dispersed model of home is revealed, which is juxtaposed to the existing, more traditional, concept. In this model, home becomes a territory, a collection, or network of (semi)public and (semi)private places connected by routes made by an individual who gives them specific values and meanings. Spatially, home is transposed from the singular space of a house/dwelling to a field of activities and actions, giving the city and its systems significant roles.

In a metropolis and metropolitan public space, increased attention has recently been given to overlooked and uncontrolled spaces. Considered as spatial 'voids,' 'idle spaces,' 'interstices,' and 'in-between' spaces, they all have one characteristic in common: 'the waiting for use' potential that can be ignited by users' creativity and tenacity, and with designers taking the role of 'enablers' rather than 'deciders'. Hence, urban leftover space becomes meaningful place with a strong local identity, enabling new connections and maximising its socio-spatial potential. This paper analyses Tokyo as a paradigmatic case study to investigate the roles of local spatial practices in the process of leftovers' identity (re)construction. More so than other global metropolises, the city represents a living laboratory for experimentation due to its compactness and the variety of small-scale urban patterns. A combination of ethnographic observations and visual analysis is applied as a trans-disciplinary method to investigate small-scale urban leftovers in Tokyo's traditional urban tissue of the shitamachi districts. This approach allows an understanding of how individuals transform and utilise leftovers, which become a dispersed constellation of tangible spaces of identity. Extrapolation of home into a public zone of liminal leftover space, through appropriation and care, becomes the key to the resilience of local identities.