New York and Tokyo represent two city projects as distant as is the culture of East and West. It is true that different civilizations, no matter how isolated they are, experience underground connections, improbable trade routes, and ancient artistic influences. But despite the invisible networks that bind, New York and Tokyo are like the beam and the underside of a thin leaf.
This Thesis narrates and studies the story of these two cities through three common and fundamental aspects, that have guided its evolution from its founding to the present: genetics, urban planning and transport networks. The genetic legacy of the nineteenth century prints in both cities the character of its design, organic and natural in Tokyo, geometric and artificial in New York. It also contrasts the overall strategy of urban planning in the twentieth century, as if the eastern city is the epitome of a city of many centers, the western city represents the most extreme city with a single large center. And finally, transport networks close this circle of yin and yang; movement while in Tokyo is based on mass transport, New York has innovated and directed its mobility towards individual transport from the early twentieth century.
Both cities are in the select group of the ten cities with the highest prosperity index according to the UN in 2013. This index depends on productivity, quality of life, infrastructure and urban quality. For this reason, and many others that are revealed throughout this work, New York and Tokyo are landmarks of civilization in their respective latitudes, which will serve as a model of urban habitat in the future, and therefore the subject of this broad study.