The Japanese governmental budget is expected to decrease along with its population. Consequently, maintaining urban services such as public transportation, commerce, and medical services in many areas of urban sprawl regions will be difficult. Although urban compaction policy is regarded as useful to resolve these problems, the lives of residents might become difficult temporarily because withdrawal of urban services will occur in some areas through the process of urban compaction. To date, this aspect of such new risk (urban layout risk) has never been reported. In this study, newly considering the time axis, the knowledge and facts of urban layout risk are revealed through a questionnaire survey. Results show the following: 1) residents do not realize the attendant urban layout risk; 2) different urban layouts and services show differing impacts on urban layout risk; 3) compaction scenarios do not always show less risk than a Business As Usual (BAU) scenario in the middle of the process for urban reform. Results show that a continuing effort is necessary to realize long-range planning.
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