Metabolism was a post-war Japanese architectural movement that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth. Metabolism sought rather to emphasize that the city constantly undergoes change like an organism, hence the biological term borrowed for its name. The aim was to give order to such transformations by allowing for the different cycles of growth and decay of urban elements. Elements with longer life spans were to form an infrastructure to which short-term elements were to be attached in a manner that expedited the latter's periodic replacement, an idea that had been explored earlier by the Groupe d'Etude d'Architecture Mobile of Yona Friedman.

During the preparation for the 1960 Tōkyō World Design Conference a group of talented young architects and designers, including Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki prepared the publication of the Metabolism manifesto. This manifesto Metabolism 1960: Proposals for a New Urbanism was published soon after the conference.