In order to achieve sustainable city development in the face of a decreasing population and an aging society, it is crucial to create compact cities. Toyama City has developed a wide range of compact city programs and is already achieving positive results. To be effective, these programs must conform to a comprehensive policy carried out by an umbrella administrative authority, and the results of each program must be carefully assessed.

But to successfully implement these compact city programs, it is essential to actively encourage the participation of citizens and local businesses, publically clarify program results, and make the longterm vision of a compact city clear.

Although the concept of the compact city has already spread widely among Japanese cities, specific actions have not been taken in most cities. Facing severe population decline and rapid increase of senior citizens in a wide-spread urban area, added to the crisis of fiscal conditions, the compact city should be implemented to promote senior citizen health, reduce social welfare costs and public facility maintenance costs, and promote downtown commerce. Our city planning system should facilitate the rebuilding of existing urban structures, shrinking residential areas for maintaining population density and relocating facilities for seniors and children. The target should be flexible and long-term. This new system should have minimal legal force and strict land use control should be enforced only after real land use changes toward the targeted use to some extent. In addition, this new planning system must be compatible with incentive systems such as tax deductions, finances, and subsidies for targeted land use. Finally, each city's financial and legal resources should be strengthened, clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the city.

Policy makers across the world are increasingly taking interest in the idea of the compact city. This article introduces two points about how to realize compact cities in Japan while learning relevant lessons from cases abroad. The first is to show the merits of the compact city as clearly as possible, especially in its effects on the local economy. A compact city facilitates a sustainable growth of local economy through streamlining local government finances, inducing more information exchange to produce urban creativity, and making use of the economy of density. The second point is to understand the compact city policy not as a pure urban policy but as an integrated land use policy, including farm lands. In Portland, integrated land use policies contributed to realizing a compact city, where a tax reduction on farm lands was simultaneously introduced with the Urban Growth Boundary. An interesting point here is that this combination of tax reduction and regulation resulted in more investments in farm lands, which reinforced competitiveness of the farm lands and eventually contributed to realizing a compact city.

The compact city concept has become a very popular urban policy among local cities in Japan because they are facing many serious challenges, including depopulation, change of retail strategies, and over-dependency on automobiles. As these challenges are rooted in the fundamental changes that occurred in Japanese society during its modernization and in the progress of urban technologies, the compact city cannot be a super solution for all these issues. The author recognizes that there is an undeniable necessity of transforming the shape of cities and that downsizing cities is one possible initiative. Different combinations of relevant initiatives befitting each local condition are required to cope with very difficult situations.

We know that Japan is facing a declining population and an aging society. And we recognize that the social situation thirty years later will be entirely different from today. Nevertheless many local municipalities have maintained concepts of growth paths for cities predicated upon expansion of the population, and the delay in responding to the declining population is serious. It is by no means easy to make a 180-degree turn. But it is necessary for us to remember that there is only a limited amount of time in which to address this issue. This paper aims to propose that many municipalities should promote the reduction of the size of urban areas in line with population decline and the restructuring of infrastructures in urban planning as soon as possible. While doing so, announcing details of implementation plans with a timeline encourages residents to change their place of residence and encourages the flow of private investment into the new urban area.

This paper explores the influence of a local government's expenditure decisions on other local governments' expenditure decisions with regard to Japanese public education. In the previous decade, the Japanese public education system was gradually decentralized. Among other aspects, the regulation concerning the actual fixed number of pupils per class was relaxed in 2001, and then again in 2003. This relaxation of regulations by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology resulted in an increase in the educational expenditure of local governments. After the national deregulation corresponding to the decline in the number of children, local governments tended to adopt other local governments' decisions.

This paper attempts to empirically analyze this behavior in terms of decisions regarding Japanese public education and provides a general conclusion on this behavior of local governments. Local governments' expenditures on public education are positively affected by the expenditures of other local governments. Local governments attempt to increase their expenditures on public education if other local governments do so.

In addition, this paper also reveals that local governments may decrease public education expenditure considering the progressive aging of Japanese society. However, while Ohtake and Sano (2010) showed that the elasticity with respect to aging is between –0.6 and –0.580, our result shows that it is between –0.218 and –0.120. This difference in the figures suggests the shift toward the relaxation of regulations pertaining to the Japanese public education system.

This study aims to clarify the importance of cooperation between municipalities to deal with the needs of public authorities. In France, municipalities (Commune) are quite small and total more than 36,000. As a consequence, cooperation authorities (EPCI) have been developing since the second half of the 20 th century. In this paper, we establish the crucial public management point in achieving agreements between each EPCI and its municipalities, especially concerning topics which often cause conflicts of interest (ex. Urbanism, Economic development). LMCU (Lille Métropole Communauté Urbaine), one of the successful cases, is taken as an example to clarify its crucial function in the region. LMCU has established an original way of improving relationships between LMCU and its municipalities, which is called Contrats de Territoire. This method features flexibility and integrity, but it has to be kept in mind that the EPCI has defects and it isn't the all-purpose system for local autonomy. Even in France, the country in which cooperation between municipalities has progressed significantly, developing relationships between each EPCI and its municipalities hasn't been easy. It is important to understand that enough competence and budget, as well as good relationships between EPCIs and municipalities, are indispensable for EPCIs to function as regional governments.

This study aims to visualize the degrees of inter-regional familiarity that residents feel in a manner that is easy to understand. The study looked at the Kanmon Area (border area between Kyushu and Honshu) as an example, an area in which two cities face each other across a strait. Two types of time-space mappings were prepared using multi-dimensional scaling on the degree of familiarity felt by residents of 9 districts in this area, as well as geographical relationships and the behavior of residents. Inter-regional familiarity has an asymmetric nature. The results of this study are centered on two points. First, these data on inter-regional familiarity with an asymmetric nature were simplified in a manner that makes comparison of geographical relationships and other matters possible, as well as visualization in two dimensions. This analysis is innovative in some ways. Second, the strong impact of the presence of the strait on inter-regional familiarity was visualized. The inter-regional familiarity felt by residents is an important point that municipal governments should focus on as they promote future wide-range cooperation. We believe that these study results will contribute to policy formulation by municipal governments in their promotion of wide-range cooperation.