Abstract
To make effective land-use Planning in rural areas like in urban areas, it is necessary to grasp the locational structure of housing and industry and so on. This paper discusses some quantitative relationships between urbanized land-use in villages and their distance to the central place within a plain by taking Nagahama City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan as a example.
Since gravity model suggests that there exists population potential resulting from central place over its surrounding area, we set up a model that describes relationship between the potential and urbanized land-use of villages surrounding the central place. The model reveals that there exists a population turning point, and also a time turn point relevant to this population turning point, when central place begins to have an obvious influence over the condition of land-use in the surrounding rural area. By means of the model we get the following conclusions.
1. When the influence from central place is small, the rate of each kind of land-use in villages takes some certain value. Along with development of the central place, the further the distance to the central place, the lower the rate of urbanized land-use, housing land-use and industrial land-use, while the higher the rate of agriculture land-use. And this kind of relationship becomes stronger over time.
2. From a micropoint of view too, location of housing in rural area strongly moves towards central place over time. Meanwhile, the place where housings begin to concentrate have a further distance from the central place than the place where industries and services do so.
3. It is derived theoretically that in Nagahama area the time turning point would have been between 1926-1927. This is supported by historical facts showing a big change in many fields in Nagahama area at that time.
