Local Community Area (LCA) Project: The Family and Village System as a Design Tool

Abstract Local Community Area© project (LCA) was a theoretical experiment in architecture and social organization. It presented a new form of collective inhabitation that rejected atomization. Working in the Japanese context, the LCA explored architectural responses to the profound demographic and economic challenges facing Japan and the rest of the world. While open to western modernization, Japan has preserved many traditional aspects such as the notion of Ie (the family system) and the Mura (the village system). This has provided space for potentially innovative socio-economic paradigms and correlating architectural and urban experiments. Taking this into consideration, the aim of this article is to critically explore the theoretical case study offered by the LCA. As historical examples that were responses to their socio-cultural contexts, the LCA speculated on architecture not as an artistic or economic manifesto but as a tool for questioning the contemporary Japanese urban society.