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Tokyo is by no means a beautiful city, but is has many examples of outstanding urban practices. One of the most charming are the many stairs found all across the city, in vast numbers and diverse shapes.
Topographically, Tokyo as a city has been built on every natural feature available: from wooden poles on swampy river banks to valleys to hills to cliffs and plateaus and steep slopes. The variation in elevation across the metropolis is minute and astounding.
Ever since its medieval origins great pains have been taken to adapt the city to the topography, from filling in swamps to leveling hill tops. But sometimes a slope is just too much, and stairs becomes the ultimate and ideal solution.
We can see just how well stairs work as an urban topology: hundreds of stairs once laid down centuries ago, are still in daily use, and in the most developed areas imaginable.
Even if converted to roads, the slope would render them unusable by any normal traffic, and so they remain, being as useful as they are picturesque and charming.
Stairs creates an oasis in an otherwise impossible busy city. It is instant "slow life" to even the most centrally located neighborhood.
At the end of the day, urban stairs, stepped alleys and slow streets mean that we can interact with the city in a physical way that flat terrain would never allow. Stairs are the only feature of a city that allows us to explore it in 3D with our own bodies.
