Seven young Japanese architects and designers, pursuing a new approach to urbanism, founded an avant-garde group in 1960 and published its radical manifesto called Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism. Numerous futuristic urban visions, along with experimental architectural practices, meant that the Metabolists became emblems of Japan's postwar cultural resurgence. At the root of the Metabolist urban utopias was a particular notion of the city as an organic process. It stood in opposition to the Modernist paradigm of urbanism and led to such ambitious design concepts as artificial land, marine civilization, metabolic cycle, megastructure, and group from, which embodied the Metabolists' ideals of social change. The first full-length critical account of the Metabolist movement focusing on its urbanism and utopianism, this book situates Metabolism in the context of Japan's mass urban reconstruction, economic miracle, and socio-political reorientation. Zhongjie Lin argues that the Metabolists' fantastic urban ideas, which often envisioned the sea and the sky as human habitats of the future, were in fact the architects' response to the particular urban and cultural crises confronting postwar Japanese society. Book jacket.