Under the Law for the Improvement of Agricultural Development Area, the conversion of farmland into non-farmland is generally prohibitted in “Agricultural Land Zone”. So, the formland cancerned must be cancelled from the designation of “Agricultural Land Zone” for it. Now, there is nopractical regulation for cancelling the designation of “Agricultural Land Zone”. Therefore, it causes disordered land use in urban-fringe.
In this paper, we analyze the unique method of cancelling the designation of “Agricultural Land Zone” of Matsuto local government. By the method, the local government can permit to cancel the designation of “Agricultural Land Zone” when the farmlands abut roads or housing lands on at least twosides. we discuss the availability of the method. The results are summarized as follows.
1. The method is mostly available for cancelling the designation of “Agricultural Land Zone”.
2. Even if we apply it, inadequate cancellation can be sometimes permitted, such as in case of the farmlands located far from rural living areas.
3. It can be improved, if we take form of the farmland adjacent to rural living area into consideration.

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To make effective land use plan, it is essential to estimate future population in planning area. For that purpose, it is necessary to comprehend the formative mechanism of population distribution in the planning area, and to develop the population estimation method based on the mechanism. In this paper, we proposed the population estimaion model which aims to estimate the population by cities, towns and villages, and based on a substantiative study, examined the fitness of the model and tried to comprehend the formative mechanism of population distribution by cities, towns and villages.
The population estimation model which proposed in this paper was constructed based on the idea that the population distribution had close relation with industrial structure, so it has the structure to estimate the population based on industrial structures and transportation conditions by cities, towns and villages, applying gravity model. Because of the purpose to make a concise model and to specify the effects of the primary industries and the secondary and tertiary industries on the population distribution formation, the input variables are consist of only four variables, which are ; firstly, the number of the primary industrial workers by cities, towns and villages, Secondary, the number of the secondary andtertiary industrial workers by cities towns and villages, thirdly, the road distances among each cities, towns andvillages, these three variables are used of estimation target year's values which are assumed as the exogenous variables, which are possible to estimate by someother methods, and lastly, the number of the population aged from fifteen to sixty-four by cities, towns and villages, this variable is used of estimation executive year's value. As a substantiative study, we applied this model to Kohoku region, Shiga prefecture using the census returns since the year 1955, and the estimation periods were 0, 5, 10 and 15 years. As the results, the fitness of the model was proved in each estimation period, because the correlations between estimated population and real population was rather high. Also the formative mechanism of population distribution in rural area was comprehended, and it was emphatically indicated that the location of establishments had became very important factor as the formation factor of population distribution in rural area year by year.

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