Population who live in food deserts are increasing in central business districts of mid-sized provincial cities. This is because of increasing number of aged residents who cannot adjust to an environment which requires long distance. In provincial areas, it is common to use cars to go anywhere and residents with difficulty in moving long distances are confronting great obstacles in daily life. Though some private companies conduct business in providing living essentials, there is no firm-framework to improving the environment by public support. As countermeasure to this, shopping on the internet or at mobile shops became popular. However, these solutions were not necessarily effective for those who have low accessibility to daily necessities. Those who have lived in city center for a long time face this problem because they could not catch up with the change in their living environment. Therefore, it is important to understand a former living environment. This study focused on city center of Matsumoto.
There are five main avenues in the commercial environment of Matsumoto city center. Based on an analysis of the function, it is found that these main avenues have existed from the time of a castle town. Along these avenues, there are shopping goods shops and they were used by the residents of the whole city. This area is named <Shopping Sphere> in this research. However, because of motorization, <Shopping Sphere> has declined, and instead, shopping malls are mainly used today. As for convenience goods, based on a study of changes in use of buildings from past to present, <Livable Sphere> supported the lives of city center residents. <Livable Sphere> is a radius of about 300m and consists of several private shops providing convenience goods to those who live in that area. The city center consists of several <Livable Spheres>. Nowadays residents use shopping malls even to get convenience goods instead of shopping in <Livable Spheres>.
In summary, it can be said that residents used to get items for their daily life within <City Sphere>, consisted of <Shopping Sphere> and <Livable Sphere>. However today, residents use shopping malls for both purposes of getting shopping and convenience goods and the potential customers of shopping malls live in whole city center. For getting shopping goods, potential users of <Shopping Sphere> originally lived in whole city center, therefore the environmental change did not affect those residents. However, as for getting convenience goods, the environmental change from <Livable Sphere> to shopping malls meant that a required distance for getting convenience goods became longer. Therefore, those who have low accessibility to shopping malls are now trapped to food desert problems.
The remnants of <Livable Sphere> can be seen in these private fresh food shops scattered around the city center. They play significant roles for supporting residents with low accessibility to shopping malls. They also provide delivery services according to the needs and selling a variety of goods. These practices were their own survival strategy at first, but as they gradually recognized the social demand, their attitudes are now oriented towards supporting food desert areas. Also, for the old customers, they can easily shop because these private shops are well-known among them. These strong connections between customers and owners is the unique characteristic of the private shops and their existence is meaningful to complement food desert areas.
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