Literature

"My own first sightings of cardboard houses were in 1983. Underneath a bridge over a filled-in canal by Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market, around the disused Shiodome railway freight station, near the old Akihabara Fresh Produce Market, along the Nihonbashi River in the vicinity of the Tokiwa Bridge, little shelters that somebody had made for himself to live in. These were built as separate isolated single dwellings, not collective settlements nothing like the squatter slums one sees in the great cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. No, these had none of the boisterous energy of family life that overflows those slums; these were quiet, solitary retreats. As if someone had sought out hidden seams and buffer zones in the constructed urban fabric in which to stake individual claims and hide away unseen.

Tacked together out of scavenged refuse materials commonly discarded in all big cities cardboard boxes, scraps of wood, polystyrene packs, mattresses, plastic tarps, umbrellas these dwellings attest to the consumate skill of their builders, persons alienated from both society and family working today in exactly the same mode as humans in primaeval times who gathered their own materials to build their own shelters in the wild.

However cramped and rickety they might appear, these "homeless" cardboard houses are the product of earnest efforts to utilise empty urban spaces. Existing within the contemporary city whose every spatial assignation is determined by economics and politics, they stand wholly apart from considerations of efficiency and power. Each individual cardboard house has a presence like a wedge driven singlehandedly into the urban mass, exposing diverse contradictions and social issues therein."

- Excerpt from Urban Hunter-Gatherer Lairs by Ryuji Miyamoto, 2003