RECENT LOCATIONAL TRENDS OF RETAIL AND SERVICE ACTIVITIES IN THE NAGOYA METROOLITAN AREA

Abstract

There is large literature which deals with th static locational differences of retail and service activities between the central city and its surrounding sphere (suburban areas), but little work has been done to clarify locational changes of different types of those activitites in a metropolitan area. The objects of this article are to show the recent locational trends in the Nagoya metropolitan area of retail and service activities of various hierarchical orders and then to consider the factors for the trends. Therefore, this paper is a basic research for purposes of the theory and experimental modeling of metropolitan dynamics. The sphere of the Nagoya metrpolitan area covers shi (cities), machi (towns) and mura (villages) where 10 percent or more of the workers living there commute to the central city (Fig. 1). The Nagoya metroplitan area of about 3, 650, 000 inhabitants in 1972 is the third largest metropolitan area in Japan. The rate of population increase in the central city (Nagoya) amounted to only 2.1 percent (1970_??_1975), but the population of Central Business District has been decreasing since about 1960. On the other hand, the surrounding sphere's (ring's) population has remarkably increased (Table 3). The main data of this paper are derived from the census of business establishments of Japan for 1966, 1969 and 1972, which are unpublished. The number of the types of service and retail activities for this analysis was limited by the lack of consistency through the data. In order to analyze locational changes in the surrounding sphere in detail, forty-one municipal districts or municipalities (shi, machi and mura) were classified chiefly on the basis of classes in the central place hierarchy to which those districts belong and by the distances to the central city (Table 3). The groups of municipal districts classified in the above manner are called sub-areas in this paper. The author divided the activities into two large groups, i.e, retail trade activities and service activities; and each of them was in turn classified into three orders. The reason for dividing them into the two large groups is that retail activities considerably influenced by supermarkets, which are not listed in the census of business establishments of Japan, should be distinguished from service activities not influenced by the supermarkets. The municipal districts and activity were classified in the above manner, and the resulting classifications are shown in Tables 3 and 5. Figs. 2 and 3 show the centrality change (1966_??_1972) for the sub-areas by the orders of activities. The formula of centrality _??_ Where Ri is the number of persons engazed in the activities of order i in the Nagoya metro-politan area, Rp is the number of inhabitants in the Nagoya metropolitan area; ri is the number of persons engazed in the activities of order i in a sub-area r; and rp is the number of inhabitants in a sub-area r. The results obtained are summarized as follows: 1) The activities with high concentration in the central city's (metropolitan) CBD are services of higher orders, finance and insurance, eating and drinking places and retails of higher orders (Table 1) in that order. The CBD's share of the total metropolitan growth of a particular function or activity corresponds the order of that function (Tables 2 and 6). The higher the share of the CBD, the higher the order of that function. From the above facts, Table 7, Figs. 2 and 3, it is apparent that the central city, especially its CBD became the even more concentrated district of the higher order function; and the location of lower order function is on the whole in equilibrium with the change of the spatial distribution of demand.