2006 Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 11-17
The amendment of the City Planning Law does not intent to restrict large scale retail stores, but to empower citizens for positive planning of their cities. Today, population in Japan has started todecrease, though it had been continuously increasing in the past. And the rate of aged people is going higher. Therefore, the policy issue we face is whether we should change the structure of urban area into more compact form in order to ensure efficiency of managing cost of the cities, by using the existing infrastructure more effective, avoiding inefficient additional public investment. The outcome of this policy change is to ensure local decision with planning procedure for developments with regional impacts. For this reason, large scale institutions that attract large number of people have to be under strict land use regulations.
