Mess is more
28/3/2025 ☼ uncertainty ☼ urban planning ☼ cities ☼ innovation
Why do some neighbourhoods or cities have such interesting, diverse, and desirable arts, culture, retail, food and beverage, and other kinds of civic life? What makes these spaces come alive while other places are boring and kinda dead? Over a decade ago, I began to do urban spatial ethnographies in Tokyo, London, Paris, and Las Vegas to get to the bottom of this question.
The non-intuitive answer I’ve come up with is that when it comes to making spaces for innovation and adaptation, mess is more — and in particular what I call structured messiness.
On the third floor of a zakkyo building in Daikanyama, outside a select shop called STRANGE STORE (16 January, 2017).
To learn about how messiness needs to be structured to support spaces that come alive, I looked at neighbourhoods and cities that have successfully diverse, continually evolving fabrics of urban life: diverse food and beverage and retail, an active residential population, many visitors, people who come in to work. I was looking for spaces that are continually evolving as good places to live, work, and play.
My exemplars for this were Far East Plaza and Lucky Plaza in Singapore and many parts of Tokyo (I’m particularly fond of Shibuya). But you can also see similar dynamics in the West Village in New York City, or Shoreditch and Soho in London (before they were destroyed as collateral damage from the UK’s policy of encouraging foreign capital inflows through property purchases by overseas big money), etc.1
The structured messiness I’m talking about is exemplified in Tokyo by old small buildings that are true mixed use. A typical example is an 8-storey, 1980s building on a 40 sqm parcel of land. The building contains restaurants, apartments, offices, retail shops sprinkled through the floors, some units less than a hundred square feet in size. The building is safe to occupy but it’s old and shabby. The units in it are small and sometimes weirdly shaped or poorly fenestrated.
This kind of building usually permits almost any kind of use that is not specifically prohibited, and is called a zakkyo building (雑居; the characters mean “miscellaneous” and “house” 2). If you operate out of a unit in one of these buildings, you can do most things as long as your neighbours don’t complain about what you’re doing. Imagine whole neighbourhoods where each block is filled with such buildings, each owned by a different person.
The effects of this kind of underlying ownership structure are profound but unintuitive, so I’ll unpack them below — they illustrate the key dimensions of correctly structured messiness in general, not just in Tokyo.
Having ownership at the level of a tiny building rather than a big one or a whole neighbourhood means there is a natural diversity of building shapes, sizes, conditions, and landlord preferences. It also makes it hard to buy up a whole block or neighbourhood because there are so many owners to negotiate with. There is high diversity of available real estate in terms of size, condition, and rent, and this diversity stays persistently high.
Diversity of ownership and density of construction means that only a handful of buildings in a neighbourhood are undergoing renovation or reconstruction at any given moment. You rarely get neighbourhood-level reconstruction or a wholesale refresh of a large block-scale shopping mall. There will always be a small fraction of the real estate stock that is new and premium, but most of the real estate stock is old and shabby.
So, we began with the initial condition of small land parcels, on which small buildings are constructed with mostly small units for miscellaneous uses. These initial conditions produce diversity of real estate ownership, landlord rental conditions, landlord preferences for businesses, unit shape, size, and condition.
This diversity is protected not by regulation but by the fragmented ownership of small properties. The fragmentation and the small size of each fragment makes it hard to do things to all the real estate stock in a neighbourhood or block at the same time.
But the diversity is of a specific type. Specifically, there’s lots of low-grade property. Old, cosmetically shabby buildings. Units that need renovation. Small, odd-shaped units. Units that don’t have frontage or are located above street level. This is not-prime real estate, even if it is located in extremely prime neighbourhoods.
This is what I mean by structured messiness: Heterogeneously owned, cosmetically shabby, small, slightly undesirable (weird floor, weird shape, weird layout) units for retail, residential, or commercial use.
This is the antithesis of what urban planners usually try to build. It looks messy and shabby, there’s no central dominant logic of what the neighbourhood is “about,” there’s no highly legible master plan. Very little is sleek, clean, new, modern, or uniform.
The effects of structured messiness are remarkable.
Established and successful business models that have achieved scale are largely kept out because they stay away of their own volition. They want and can afford bigger, newer, less weird space, so they naturally avoid shabby, old, weird spaces. Rich people, successful businesses, and efficient big chains don’t overrun the neighbourhood because there is literally no room for them.
Untested business models can almost always find a cost-effective home. Because the real estate stock is messy (small, old, shabby, weird), per square foot prices will be lower, and there will be smaller units available. Because this is not top-tier real estate, the relationship between landlord and tenant is also usually more equal (or at least less imbalanced in favour of landlord). Leases have shorter lock-ins, landlords are more amenable to tenants modifying their spaces, break clauses are less onerous (or non-existent), tenant notice periods are shorter, etc. The instant noodle-eating startup founder, the single parent artist working two jobs, the chef trying out a new restaurant concept, the lawyer opening up a solo practice in AI copyright law can find homes at prices they can afford and on terms they can accept.
STRANGE STORE, Daikanyama (16 January, 2017).
When untested business models inevitably fail, they fade out easily and non-disruptively because their footprint was small to start with. The weird new restaurant concept lasts 6 months and no one likes it. It closes, and the chef is sad but can move on because he lost $15,000 on a buildout in a space that cost him $1,000/month in rent, instead of losing $2 million on the buildout of a space that cost him $18,000/month in rent.
And when untested business models succeed, they have the option of expanding by taking up other spaces nearby or leaving to find better space.
Structured this way, messy space allows rapid, low-cost business model testing. Those that work stick around or expand, those that don’t evaporate fast, opening up space for other business models to enter. When I say “business model,” I mean it both for individual residents (“do I like living in this neighbourhood?”) and for businesses (“will this kinda kooky select shop with nonspecific hours work here?”).
Structured messiness lets spaces (whether cities, neighbourhoods, or buildings) take advantage of the generative potential for innovation that can only come from not knowing in advance what will fill a space.
Structured messiness is what enables continual change, update, innovation in what goes in that space. This is what makes spaces come alive. And when people see that interesting opportunities for living, working, and playing are showing up in a neighbourhood, they show up too.
In Tokyo, structured messiness emerged from historical accident and planning conventions (the zakkyo model). But you see elements of structured messiness in other cities, neighbourhoods, or even specific buildings.
The crucial insight is that you can replicate much of this messy structure using contracts and guidance. If you are an urban planner, real estate developer, real estate portfolio manager, it is in your power to implement structured messiness, and thus to produce mixed-use buildings, neighbourhoods, or cities that continually change, adapt, evolve. You too can use structured messiness to make spaces that are great places to live, work, and play, spaces that are alive.
If these ideas for structuring living, innovative spaces (organisations3, buildings, neighbourhoods, or cities) resonate with you, or if you want to implement these ideas yourself, please reach out. I’d love to chat.
(🙏 Lee Chor Pharn for suggesting “mess is more” as a much better title than what I’d originally come up with.)
I’ve been working on turning discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools for productive discomfort.
And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can succeed in uncertain times. The Uncertainty Mindset is my book about how to design organisations that thrive in uncertainty and can clearly distinguish it from risk.
There’s an idea floating around that having affordable housing is the overridingly important parameter in creating dynamic, innovative, living cities. Having affordable housing is important, but it is usually one of the beneficial side effects of structured messiness. Structured messiness drives both housing affordability (because non-prime, weirdly shaped, slightly shabby real estate is naturally more affordable) for the same reason it drives dynamic, adaptable, innovative space use. But affordable housing on its own doesn’t seem to reliably lead to innovative space use — as the many bland (or worse) neighbourhoods with large social housing projects in, for example, France, Singapore, and Germany indicate.↩︎
If you want to read more on zakkyo in English: An early exploration of how zakkyo affects how people interact with a city (2007) was followed decades later by a framing of zakkyo as enabler of emergence (2022), zakkyo as enabler of urban innovation (2024) and zakkyo as component of a different context for urban development (2024).↩︎
Incidentally, the underlying theory of structured messiness is that spaces become innovative and alive when their structure makes it easier to test what goes inside them, to easily and painlessly shed tests that don’t work, and to keep and grow tests that do work. This mechanism is what I call negotiated joining, and I first described it as a novel and highly effective way to hire people into teams that do innovation work. You can find out more about negotiated joining in my book, The Uncertainty Mindset (Part 4), or in this paper.↩︎