Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the living environments in proximity to suburban business areas and to compare them to the central district of the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Commuting areas that surround 39 suburban business districts have been defined as self-sustaining regions (SSRs). Living environments within these regions and the central Tokyo region have been described and mutually compared on the basis of data from the National Housing and Estate Statistics as well as several other supplementary statistics.
Overall, the comparison of living environments reveals that housing affordability and commuting distance were the main problems within central Tokyo, while those two factors did not pose as much of a problem in SSRs. In addition, through cluster analysis using living environmental indicators, we have broken SSRs into three categories and have analyzed their characteristic features. It has been identified that SSRs within each category were closely distributed geographically, forming spatial clusters. From the standpoint of business characteristics, one category had a high ratio of white-collar jobs, which is similar to central Tokyo, while the other two categories had high ratios of blue-collar jobs. Dependency on automobiles for daily transportation was relatively high in all SSR categories when compared to central Tokyo.
