Tokyo — the city that changed me forever. Past, present, and future are bound together here, modernity continually shaped by history. It feels like an urban masterpiece — perhaps humanity’s most accomplished expression of city-making.

Even coming from another global city, the scale was dizzying. The transport networks, street design, and architecture felt inexhaustible in their ingenuity. Everywhere I looked, there was a clarity of design and quality of execution that forced me to rethink what I thought cities could be.

I was conscious of the challenges and pressures that sit beneath the creation of such a vast and complex urban system. And yet, standing within it, I could not escape the feeling that Tokyo occupies a category of its own — a place against which few, if any, cities can reasonably be compared.