Mizube no kioku : Kandagawa shūhen no ushinawareta suiryū kūkan no konseki 水辺の記憶──神田川周辺の失われた水流空間の痕跡

The Edo period (1603-1867) is a richly documented epoch, with abundant and varied information on the city of Edo that provides a wide array of perspectives on many aspects of urban life and environment. Although accounts of the central districts of the city are more copious than those describing its suburbs, there are enough written, material and iconographic sources to give us a quite vivid image of peripheral spaces as well, as in the case of the area explored in this chapter. It focusses on a neighborhood around a section of the Kanda River (Kandagawa) which was once a north-western suburb of the shogun’s city and is currently situated where the central wards of Toshima, Shinjuku and Bunkyō border each others. This area can be thought as a microcosm whose characteristics are tied to the morphology of the territory crossed by Kanda River, with different features between plain and hill, the first once populated mainly by the lower classes and the latter largely reserved to the former military elite, thus reflecting the patterns of socio-spatial organization in Edo. The written and visual materials of the past give evidence of the shape of both this section of Kanda River and the territory around it, as well of the presence of water – water that irrigated the rice fields in the plain, beautified the residences of the upper class on the hill, and took the form of water courses, ponds and other watery places, some of which partially survived, while others would have been lost together with several human activities linked to water.