Abstract
The City-Region means “a regional sphere which includes a core city and its neighboring rural regions most closely connected with the city economically and socially.” The influence of a city actually seen in the areal structure is particularly evident in the daily movement of people, so we recognize the city-region in the light of this fact. The writer has carried out a social-geographical research of Tokai District, Central Japan, with its nucleus city Nagoya, by distributing questionnaires (90, 000 sheets) among about one tenth of the entire households located in the area. The items of them run as follows:
a) The commutation places of the dwellers.
b) The main places for the dwellers to purchase ten kinds of daily necessaries.
The collected data were summed up for each town or village according to each item of inquiry, and thus the percentage of those households having strong connection with one or another of the cities in the area was calculated for each item, and again for each town or village. The ratios concerning purchasing places for high-grade commodities and commutation places were averaged, and as a result the ratio of city-dependency of each town or village inhabitants was obtained for each city (Fig. 1, 2). Each town or village was affiliated to one city-region or another according to the highest dependency ratio that it had, and thus the areal sphere of each city-region was demarcated (Fig. 3).
These city-regions form a network pattern by directly joining with one another. At the central part there is the Nagoyo-city-region which occupies the southeastern half of the Nobi plain. It is evident that each city-region has not only the internal unity and a sort of independence, but also connection to the external world through the core city.
The urban powers of adjoining cities exclude one another and form their respective city-regions, but in the district investigated the largest one formed by the giant city Nagoya includes several satellite cities within, and at the same time it spreads its strong urban power potentially over many other medium-sized or small neighboring city-regions. The urban power tends to extend farther along the traffic facilities such as railways, and also to penetrate into those quarters where no strong rival cities lie. These are important factors having influence upon the areal form of each of the city-regions.
The size of each city-region keeps a direct proportional relation to the size of its core city. The correlation co-efficient between them is 0.934, and it shows a high degree of positive correlation (Fig. 4). Accordingly, the general idea of a large city with a large city-region is scientifically proved.
When we calculate the ratio between these two indicators mentioned above, and call it “the city-region index”, the height of the index of each city-region shows some regional differences. The index shows the degree of urban development and it is higher in lowland regions than in highland regions. Besides it is a criterion on which we can judge in what degree the core city has the region under its control. The size of the index shows a relative balance of powers among many city-regions.
