At the city center of Fukuoka City, a core city of Northern part of Kyushu island in Japan, large-scale retail developments have completed one after another within two years of 1996 to 1998. They include openings of two new department stores and one new large commercial complex, and one enlargement of shop-floor area of an existing department. As a result, the total increase of shop-floor area becomes 13.4 ha. If restricted to the central commercial district of “Tenjin”, the total shop-floor space of the department stores has drastically been expanded to 2.7 times the previous one. Such a rush of large-scale retail developments is quite a rare event. Thus the case of Fukuoka City gives a valuable occasion to investigate the effect of redevelopment on the structure of city center since, to our knowledge, few empirical research has been carried out to identify the effect of redevelopment based on a behavioristic standpoint.
This study has conducted three on-site surveys on consumer's shop-around behavior before and after the actual developments at the city center of Fukuoka, and identified their effect on the structure of city center as the change of consumer's shop-around behavior between retail establishments using Markov shop-around model.