Tokyo captivates. Where else could you shop beneath a bullet-train track, get lost in the world’s densest bar district, then sing karaoke in the sky? Such urban features, Tokyo’s fervent boosters insist, could exist only in Japan.

But Spanish-born architect and educator Jorge Almazán begs to differ. In his insightful, infectious study of his adopted home, Almazán pushes back against the conceit that Tokyo’s urban fabric is a fully formed reflection of a quintessential Japaneseness. Instead, the city’s urban innovations are, in Almazán’s term, “emergent,” the haphazard results of on-the-fly decisions, accidents of history, and unintended consequences that “arose as much from the bottom up through serendipity and painful necessity as [they] did through intentional design.”