抄録
Restoration undertakings with administrative support can lately be found not only in important preservation districts for groups of historic buildings but also in urban districts, and efforts are being made to maintain and preserve excellent townscapes and improve landscapes. One of the ways to undergo restoration is through receiving subsidies by meeting the requirements mandated by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. In particular, undertakings for townscape improvement are based on “MACHIDUKURI agreements” concluded by the residents of a district, and are positioned as resident-driven undertakings.
Undertakings for townscape improvement characteristically involve building pocket parks, beautifying roads, and restoring housing, all of which are necessary to create excellent townscapes. However, only a few undertakings for townscape improvement have been integrally completed in combination with restoration of housing and widening of roads. Using setbacks is one of the approaches to widening roads, and the shopping district of Soja city is one of the districts that adopted this approach. There are no parks in the shopping district, and roads wider than six meters account for less than 10% of the total roads in the district. Therefore, setbacks of housing walls were planned and carried out. Instead of using the space created by the setbacks for roads, as stipulated in the Building Standards Act, the space created in the district was used as building lots. Creating a boundary area between a road, a public area, and housing, a private area, makes it possible to widen a road even in shallow premises. In this way, clarifying how a townscape created by a setback was restored and analyzing how it is being utilized can give clues for new planning methods for undertaking townscape improvement.
Consequently, it was made clear that most restored buildings failed to achieve the initial objective of “preserving townscape with traditional flavor” because the spaces created by the setbacks were used as parking lots, though they secured the two meters stipulated by the MACHIDUKURI agreement. Because the city's east side has many traditional buildings that are highly valuable from a historical viewpoint, the city is required to give consideration to preserving the townscape and building a continuous townscape. The same issue arises not only for buildings but also for open spaces and parking lots. It is also a problem that some buildings do not meet the color and roofing standards set by the MACHIDUKURI agreement. It was originally planned to build pocket parks and community facilities as spaces for relaxing, but only three pocket parks were eventually built. As a result, the total area of pocket parks accounts for only 0.7% of the whole area of the district. That is, the greatest problem of this undertaking is that the spaces for relaxing inside the district were scarcely improved, although restored buildings offered better living environments.
In the future, therefore, it will be crucial to increase residents' awareness of landscapes and townscapes in order to achieve a better living environment in districts with many traditional buildings. At the same time, it will be necessary to discuss measures not only for the restoration of each building but also for the improvement of the landscape of the whole townscape.