Rural Planning from the Viewpoint of Water Resources Management

Abstract

Each rural area has a particular character depending on the resources, such as water or land, which control the activity and the existence of the inhabitants in the area. The distinguishing trait of the regional resources in Japan is its open and inter-dependent structure. In the latter period of the Edo era, suburban villages had good connections with cities in the exchange of regional resources, and the balance of regional resources as well as ecology was kept over quite a large area. This was mainly due to the water circulation which brought effective environmental conservation because of its natural selfpurification. It could be said that the structure of regional resources at that time was formed so as to encourage a natural purification of the environment. Agricultural productivity has risen along with increased mechanization and chemicalization which have definitely changed the balance of regional resources in rural and suburban areas . In this process, water use in rural areas has tended to lose its multi-functional character including irrigation, drinking, washing, fire-extinguishing, snowmelting, etc. The most important point is that the separation of the functions has been incomplete . The author pointed out the necessity of recombining certain functions of water use in rural and suburban areas. Those are recombinations between: 1) village drainage and irrigation 2) water quality management and water quantity management 3) water use ordering and land use ordering 4) activities of farmers and non-Laming inhabitants. Nowadays, water development is entering into “the stage of limitation”. We should take it into consideration when we discuss planning for rural and suburban areas