Changes in the Distribution of Population within a City

Abstract

The distribution of population within an urban area changes in accordance with the concentration of industries and population into the city. In this paper, the author analysed the changes in the distribution of population within urban areas in ten years from 1955 to 1965, taking several cities with different size as examples. Following cities in Tohoku were selected ; Sendai, Morioka, Yamagata, Hirosaki, Odate, Yokote and Furukawa. The populations of these cities in 1965 ranged from 481, 000 to 44, 000. The urban area of each city was divided by concentric cricles with intervals of 250 meters from the point with the highest land value as its center. At the same time, these circles were divided into sixteen sectors. Next, population and the number of households based on the Population Census for the year 1955 and 1965 were counted to analyse the changes in each unit area, which is common in size to all sample cities.The results are summarized as follows ;The changes in the distribution of population and the number of households show different tendencies in accordance with the population size of cities. At the central areas in larger cities such as Sendai, Morioka and Yamagata, population has been decreased with considerably high rates, while the number of households has been changed with low decrease rate. Owing to the decrease of population in the central areas, the population density is lower there than in areas somewhat apart from the central areas, where population has been decreased a little, although its density is the highest in the cities. The urban fringe areas of these cities show extremely high rates of population increase.At the central areas in smaller cities such as Hirosaki, Odate, Yokote and Furukawa, the number of households has been increased a little, in spite of a slight decrease of population, and these areas maitnain the highest population density in the cities. In these cities, increasing rates are considerably high only at areas somewhat apart from the central areas.