2020 Volume 72 Issue 2 Pages 91-106
This paper reports the transitions in urban structure for Urban Employment Areas （UEAs） in Japan by using municipal and 1 km-grid population data from 1980 to 2015. UEAs consist of central and suburban municipalities, and UEAs are categorized based on the population changes in each by applying the Klaassen’s method.
In 1980s and 1990s, many UEAs in Japan experienced urbanization and suburbanization. In these decades, the largest cities showed the tendency of decentralization. However, after 2000, most UEAs showed the tendency of centralization, especially among the small-sized UEAs. This result was different from the hypothesized transitions of Klaassen’s urban life cycle model, lacking the deurbanization phase.
In Japan, a clear positive correlation in population size and growth has emerged as economic and social changes have proceeded, such as changing industrial structure and the declining birth rate and aging. Smaller UEAs are experiencing population decline earlier than larger UEAs along with the decrease in the total population in Japan. As the population of larger UEAs are also likely to decrease in the near future, there is plenty of possibilities that larger UEAs will also centralize following the same structural change that smaller UEAs have recently experienced.
