Masaya Sammonji is an urban designer and researcher in urban planning history. He studied urban engineering at the University of Tokyo and completed his doctorate in engineering there in 2024. His research approaches Taiwanese urban planning through the formation and transformation of everyday facilities, particularly public bathhouses and night markets. In 2018 he co-founded Ryudoshoten, undertaking urban and architectural design and planning projects in Japan and overseas. His practical activities also include conserving and reusing Japanese public bathhouses, organizing bathhouse-themed festival floats and developing exhibitions that explore Asian cities. These projects connect historical research with the ways people use and reshape urban space. He works as a project researcher in the University of Tokyo’s Urban Design Laboratory and as a research associate in architecture at Tokyo University of the Arts. Taiwan Yoichi Taizen, a comprehensive account of Taiwanese night markets, combines color photographs of food stalls, games, fortune-telling and other services with an examination of the systems that sustain them. It explores market locations and historical development, utility supplies and the movement of stalls outside opening hours, while asking whether similar markets could be created in Japan. By placing tourism alongside commerce, infrastructure and daily life, the book extends his interest in cities as environments continually altered through use rather than simply as completed physical designs.
