Optimum City Size to Optimum City Structure: Urban Facility Location Plan

Abstract

　Lots of studies on city have focused on city size. These studies aimed to estimate an optimum size of a city from the view point of the efficiency in public services, and to reveal the factor of amalgamation. However, in Japan, the number of amalgamation is gradually winding down, so the significance of focusing on amalgamation would be decreasing. On the other hands, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) has encouraged municipals to make the urban facility location plan which promotes "compact city", and to request of the municipals that they change the city structure. Based on the above, this paper focused on the effort of municipals on the city structure.

　In general, since the concept of "compact city" is recognized as desirable, MLIT has encouraged it, but it's still the case that under 20% of municipals seek to make the plan. Why so low? In order to answer this question, we made a hypothesis that whether each municipal seek to make land-use planning or not is depending on the ratio of agree or disagree on the plan. Result of testing the hypothesis, this paper come to the conclusion that the hypothesis was rejected.