- Planning Standards for better Townscape in Japanese Rural Cities? Planning Ordinances of Outside of the City Planning Area and Urbanisation Control Area    24 kb by    Muraki, Miki & Kunitani, Kosuke & Kuno, Toshimitsu | muraki@tu.chiba-u.ac.jp    Short Outline The purposes of this paper are to examine how rural local councils can control developments and keep and create better townscape under planning ordinance in Japan. Abstract The City Planning System in Japan is based on the City Planning Areas; however, the designated City Planning Areas is addressed only 25% of the land area in the nation. The remainder of the land is agricultural, forest, national parks and natural resources, which are controlled by a variety of departments and regulated by different laws. On the other hand, great number of cities has planning ordinance in order to create better framework for planning standards and control the new developments and sustain their own townscape. However, effectiveness of these planning ordinance, particularly rural areas, is unclear. The purposes of this paper are to examine how local councils can control developments and keep and create better townscape under planning ordinance. In this paper, we attempt to clarify the roles of local councils and recommend a more desirable framework for controlling townscape in Japanese rural cities. We firstly reviewed the City Planning System in Japan. The City Planning Areas divided into two types: the Divided City Planning Areas and the Un- Divided City Planning Areas. The former is designated metropolitan areas and is again divided into the Urbanisation Promotion Area with zoning regulation and the Urbanisation Control Area. The latter is designated cities with a population of over a hundred thousand and has zoning areas and non-zoning areas. The City Planning Act 1992 required entire city planning authorities to draw up comprehensive plans to 2025. The central government required two types of planning for the comprehensive plan: strategic planning and area planning with citizen participation. Historic cities, or areas where vernacular housing style remains, it is not hard to share vision of the area/city also planning standards and development controls for sustaining townscape. However, the rest of the areas, typical image of the city is hard to draw up as our townscape is rapidly changing. To clarify the current development situation in rural areas, we had questionnaire survey to 255 local councils either have outside of the City Planning Area and the Urbanisation Control Area, and that have planning ordinance. Even all councils wished that new developments should be concentrated in the Urbanisation Promotion Area, only 18% of local councils answered that new developments have recognised neither in the Urbanisation Control Area nor outside of the City Planning Area, and most developments could be seen along the trunk roads, because change of the use from agriculture to these uses. As a consequence, development control is weak and urban sprawl is progressed in the rural area, even they have planning ordinances. For this reason, further coordination between planning and agriculture section is required. The planning ordinances were regulated to sustain townscape, as the object of planning ordinances, 59% of 255 local councils is sustaining the great nature and townscape. Accordingly, planning ordinances are not actively worked, particularly to control the new developments. Because the opportunities of drawing up visions of the city, particularly outside of the City Planning Area is limited, and lack of vision causes difficulty of planning controls. On the other hand, new developments can be produced new employment opportunity and tax income to local councils. So that development control is again difficult to tackle depopulation problems and local independence for small cities. The final section of this paper will present data from questionnaire survey and discuss vision of the area/city. As a result, more than half cities have particular vision of the city, however, we recognised the differences between populated and depopulated cities: 79% of the cities which has the Urbanised Area have vision of the cities, and only 39% of the cities which has the Un-Divided City Planning Area and outside of the City Planning Area have. The former cities already have opportunity to draw up land use strategies such as town centre strategies or tourism strategies, however, depopulated cities, particularly without any tourist interests, it is hard to draw up any vision of the area/city. The paper ends with a discussion as to how local councils can effectively worked together in the planning and outside of the City Planning Area to control townscape. Tackling the issue of new developments, particularly rural areas in Japan, it suggests that: 1) image of the cities even they are outside of the City Planning Area, cooperation between local people is essential and must share vision of the area: 2) cooperation with agricultural departments are particularly important to control outside of the City Planning Area. Keywords planning ordinance, townscape, development control Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2002: The Pulsar Effect   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper