The Compact City Indicators were published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in 2014 to support municipalities for monitoring and evaluating the compactness of their city. The research examined cross statistical correlations of the Compact City Indicators deployed throughout cities in Japan. The research team has analyzed the data of the Compact City Indicators that specifically monitor walkability to local services, including retail shops, medical and elderly day care facilities, and public transportation, in qualified compact cities and carried out cluster and regression statistical analyses.

Based on the analyses, “quality of life and convenience,” “health care and welfare,” and “regional economic” evaluation categories of the Compact City Indicators have been found to be strongly related to the following respective indicators: “walkable distance to local services,” “number of diabetes inpatients,” and “retail sales per unit area.” With these three indicators as dependent variables, the remaining Compact City indicators have been set as independent, and regression analyses have been carried out to evaluate each evaluation category.

The “library construction steering committee” conducted continued debates to reflect the opinions of residents in the construction of the new town library in Obuse, Nagano Prefecture. The concept of the library transformed from one based on conventional usage to one based on new exchanges, thus attracting attention for several years.

The original space composition, featuring openness and diversity, seems to be the result of debates conducted by the steering committee over a period of one and a half years. The main topic of this study is to gain a concrete grasp of the debate process by extracting important group conversations held during the decision-making process.

Based on the international agreements achieved after the Kyoto Protocol was established, some projects for reducing greenhouse gas emissions have been promoted in Japan. Policies such as various regulations and the introduction of an environmental tax have been discussed, many of which place significant responsibility on citizens. However, in many local cities, important problems such as declining birth rate, aging population, and stagnation of regional economy make it difficult give priority to a global warming prevention policy. In addition, even when a local city has plenty of natural resources, such as forest, wind, water, and sunlight, financial difficulties often hinder the funding needed to implement a global warming prevention policy which utilizes these resources. In this study, we propose a small hydroelectric generation project involving citizen participation, which includes not only monetary donations but also active cooperation in the project itself, such as cleaning and patrolling the facilities and environment. The project is evaluated based on the willingness to work (WTW) using the contingent valuation method and general equilibrium analysis. As a result, the WTW for the project has been estimated as a function of its various attributes: the revenue, the profit to the local community, and the reward to contributors.