The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of a new style of planning for aged and environmentally conscious societies. The planning is based on the concept of taking advantage of community stocks and achieving solutions to community problems through co-creation involving various entities. This new planning consists of 5 elements; sharing community challenges and strategies, community empowerment, utilization of stocks as resources, project planning and implementation, and sustainability assessment. It seems important to promote new attempts by integrating these related elements and to clarify the necessary techniques and institutional issues for it.

It is said that the concept of community no longer exists in apartment complexes. Yet re-evaluation of the community function in apartment complexes following two great earthquake disasters has found the need for such communities. We propose that the courtyard type medium-rise apartment complex is an effective structure for community building and is good for the city environment.

This paper proposes the building of sustainable suburban multigeneration communities through community greening activities. This research shows three areas where residents participate in community greening activities in Yokohama City. Based on the investigations of these areas, this paper shows that greening activities involve a rather wide age range, help many people, including nonparticipants, recognize the effects, encourage communication, and develop an attachment between the younger generation and their own residential areas. Therefore, community greening activities can contribute to building multigeneration communities in suburban detached housing areas. However, it is necessary to continue the activities and contrive ways of management befitting each area.

In a society characterized by a declining population due to an increasing rate of senior citizens and a low birthrate, it is important for us to manage the area in which we live by ourselves. We need to pay more attention to designing streets, parks and meeting places in housing areas that promote a livable environment and affluent community, and to establishing a management system to sustain such infrastructure. To achieve this, it is necessary for us to establish a system to organize homeowners associations, in which all homeowners in the housing area will participate, change the current municipal registration system, establish a new role in which developers collaborate with the local government, and introduce a new program to fester specialists in various areas of development.

The future of new community development requires extensive consideration of environmental, economic, social, and other aspects. Through these considerations, we need to enhance the efficiency of community functions, revitalize the community economy, and minimize environmental impacts. In order to develop sustainable communities, new potentials of locality need to be recognized and integrated appropriately with the existing social and environmental characteristics. This article illustrates the potential of sustainability assessment (SA) in achieving this goal. Firstly, we briefly summarize the theoretical background of SA based on literature review, highlighting the significance of eliciting the value of local stakeholders and their integration into the planning process. We then provide two brief statements on potential aspects of community development, such as regional and neighborhood planning, in which SA could play a significant role.

The Great East Japan Earthquake was a huge disaster that devastated an extremely large area of eastern Japan. The Japanese Government should have a reconstruction roadmap that will provide courage and hope to residents of the disaster areas. The Japanese Government set up an advisory panel named the Reconstruction Design Council in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake. This council submitted the final report on Basic Reconstruction Guidelines and suggested the importance of Community Based Planning. In this paper, I describe the planning process of the “Woodlands School Project” in Higashi-Matsushima City as a challenge to social investment for future communities in area damaged by the Great Earthquake. Japan has traditionally been a country with forests. However, we gradually lost the value of respecting our forests, and we pushed forests out of our lives during the 20 th century. The Woodland School Project will encourage an attitude of respect for nature and foster the basic understanding needed to design a sustainable community.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake caused unprecedented damage. Innumerable nonprofit organizations held voluntary emergency relief activities in the damaged areas. Although contributions were generous, donations to disaster relief funds of nonprofit organizations remains low. As the flows of donations are so complex, people cannot find sufficient information concerning how nonprofit organizations use their donations. At the source of the issue seems to be the lack of a clear method for grasping the framework or flows of donations. To exam these problems, we attempted to aggregate the flow of disaster support funds by constructing a matrix to represent the inflow and outflow of relief funds at various disaster support organizations. Throughout this process, we discuss the statistical method of accounting for the various relief fund flows. Using the matrix, we found that donations for disaster relief funds totalled over 675 billion yen, and each of them has various use. In addition, we found that there are no specified accounting rules for relief fund reports provided to the public, which further confuses donors.

While the promotion of inbound tourism by the government is proceeding, the concentration of tourists to some areas has become an issue from the aspects of the capacity of facilities and the disparities of benefits from inbound tourism consumption. To evaluate the government policy, we created indicators to measure the concentration of destination and applied them to a case study of Hokkaido, where there is disparity between Sapporo and other areas. In addition to the occupancy rate of tourists in Sapporo and the average distance between Sapporo and each area, we adopted the Gini coefficient per population, the number of employees of the lodging industry and the number of available rooms. We revealed quantitatively that the concentration of foreign tourists is higher than that of Japanese tourists. We also found that the concentration elicited by the occupancy rate of Sapporo does not always show the same tendency as the concentration indicated by the Gini coefficient and the average distance.