This article examines the case of the Gyoda Hachiman Marche, held every Sunday in Gyoda City in Saitama Prefecture, to understand the significance of the marche. By analysing how the vendors of the marche, who sell their crops, food, and drink, or handicrafts, position the act of selling within their respective productive activities or everyday lives, how they use the marche, and what kind of experiences the marche creates for them, we consider what kind of role is played for the vendors by the experiences obtained from directly connecting to consumers at the marche.

　　The results show that the marche itself has not become a place where the vendors expect to function economically. However, the marche does provide positive direct and indirect effects on the economic activity at the vendors’ permanent locations or other sales locations. Although the economic scope of this effect is small, it extends beyond only the city centre to the wider area of Gyoda City. The role that the marche fulfils cannot be measured by only the economic effects generated in the space of the marche itself.

　　Furthermore, the experiences that give rise to these positive effects are based on relationships between subjects that spread over various scales. The relationships between the vendors produced by the space of the marche make the marche a place to meet with others face to face, and relationships with customers who visit the marche from both inside and outside of Gyoda City contribute to the establishment of the marche as a place where vendors can obtain favourable assessments of their merchandise, such as the crops the vendors have grown themselves. Moreover, at the individual scale, the marche is a place where one can really feel a sense of regional contribution to the local area of Gyoda City and, particularly for those who have left the area due to employment or marriage, a place that functions to maintain one’s ties to Gyoda City. Furthermore, for the elderly, selling their wares at the marche is an ‘enjoyable’ activity, providing the marche with significance regarding personal welfare as this ‘enjoyable’ feeling spreads into their personal lives. The marche as a place that is ‘enjoyable’ can be said to influence its participants’ economic activity and everyday lives that take place in a space larger than the marche itself.

  Walkability has been the focus of much attention in recent urban policy. In order to quantitatively verify the effects of walkability on local economies, residents’ health, and other aspects of daily life, it is highly desirable to develop an objective walkability index covering a large geographical extent based on consistent criteria and release it in an easy-to-use format. In this study, we developed a walkability index （JPWI） of all postal code areas in Japan for public use, consisting of three neighborhood elements:population density, number of facility types, and road connectivity. We described the outline of the index and verified its usefulness through an analysis of its relationship to the walking time of residents in large cities based on the Geo-social survey for Urban Lifestyle Preferences （GULP）. As a result of the analysis, statistically significant positive associations were found between the JPWI and walking time by purpose, such as commuting, errands, and leisure. Furthermore, these associations of JPWI with walking time were almost identical to those of the walkability index at the precise address level, indicating the usefulness of JPWI as a neighborhood level walkability index.