Abstract
In the early 1970s, the administration of the former town of Itsukaichi in Hiroshima Prefecture, where the former Ministry of Home Affairs had designated a Model Community Area, had already initiated its own community policy. Although this policy stagnated afterwards due to political struggles and rapid urbanization, construction of public halls and their use as community centers have continued and lead to the foundation of a new community organization in the former Model Community Area. This case study suggests that the institutionalization of community generates unintended social relations and organizations and argues from the perspective of the social meaning of the institutionalization of community that we should further the empirical study of the particular historical and local contexts of each municipality where the Model Community Areas were once designated in order to develop a theoretically concrete idea of municipal decentralization.
