As of 2015, the relative poverty rate of children in Japan is 13.9%, which is higher than the average of OECD countries, and researchers have pointed out that the problem of social inequality is getting worse. Therefore, it is important to clarify what kind of urban formation is for children to acquire their individual capabilities.
Thus, we focus on the Children’ s Cafeterias, which provides low-cost meals, heartwarming time and activities that can raise children’ s awareness of capabilities. Recently, their number has been increasing and there are 3,700 Children’ s Cafeterias in Japan, although we can find few detailed reports on their locations which are not determined by the government but by their managers. Thus we conducted survey and interview on the officials of local governments and managers of Children’ s Cafeterias in order to understand the tendency of their locations and the necessary measures to supports the Children’ s Cafeterias.
We interviewed officials from eight local governments in Tokyo Metropolis. As a result, some municipalities regarded children's cafeterias as regional base facilities with child care support functions and others as support activities for children with necessity. Of these, the latter municipalities were targeted. Therefore, we selected Adachi, Edogawa, Ota, Taito and Toshima wards as the target municipalities. In these municipalities, this research conducted survey on the officials and the managers thorough the questionnaire and the interview.
In addition, we analyze the location characteristics of Children’ s Cafeterias by referring to land use zones, roadside land prices and the estimated rates of relatively poor households.
Most of the managers pointed out that they are concerned about the rent or facility usage fee and they are dissatisfied with the present locations. The analysis by Akaike’ s information criterion showed that most of the Children’ s Cafeterias locate in the commercial area in terms of land use districts. However, the roadside land prices of Children’ s Cafeterias are lower than those of the surrounding area. These results suggest that the Children’ s Cafeterias are indirectly lead to the locations convenient but with inexpensive land prices outside of the main street. The result of the analysis by the distribution of relatively poor households showed that the districts without Children’ s Cafeterias, which are 800 meters or more to the nearest Children’ s Cafeterias, have higher rates of poor households.
