Service Areas in Miyagi Prefecture

Abstract

A serivce area is a sphere of influence of a service center. Within the sphere, people's daily movements in the purchase of merchandise and the utilization of services are centered around the service center. The term “service area” implies both simple area and synthetic area. The former is set up as a sphere of accumulation of the movements concerning only one type of activity. The latter, in general, is set up by examining and comparing the spheres of several types of activities. The purpose of the paper is to demarcate boundaries of the service areas in Miyagi Prefecture. The authors attempted to set up the synthetic areas rationally by treating overlapping or indefinite areas as carefully as possible.The research was carried out by means of questionnaires which were distributed to the junior high school students of each of two hundred and six survey tracts to bring home. Two consumer goods and two “services” were chosen as indicators for demarcating the boundaries: underwear and leather shoes, and patronage of movie theaters and medical facilities.Date of distribution: July, 1962Number of questionnaires: 12, 958Rate of recovery: 93%Sample ratio (recovered questionnaires/all households in the object area) : 1/20In this paper, the authors deal with both the people's daily destinations and the irrates of dependency on fixed service centers. The rate of dependency means the rate with which householders in each survey tract depend upon fixed service centers in their own tract or other tracts in the purchase of merchandise or the usage of services. The rate of utilization of service centers by householders in each survey tract was calculated for each indicator by dividing the number of questionnaires listing specific service centers by the total number of valid questionnaires recovered.To set up service areas, all the tracts in the object area were classified into five types according to their dependency patterns with respect to: whether a tract depends on other tracts or whether it is depended upon by other tracts, the degree to which a tract depends on other tracts or is depended upon by other tracts, the location and number of tracts which a given tract depends upon. The following classification was applied to each of the four indicators:A1: A tract which is completely dependent upon its own service center and is completely depended upon by one or more other tracts.A2: A tract which is completely dependent upon its own service center but is not completely depended upon by any other tract.B: A tract which depends upon both a service center in its own tract and one or more service centers in other tracts, but which is not depended upon by other tracts.C1: A tract which does not depend upon a service center in its own tract but depends upon only one service center in another tract.C2: A tract which does not depend upon a service center in its own tract but depends upon two or more other service centers in other tracts.Synthetic service areas were set up (Fig. 4) by examining the types and destinations of the four indicators in each tract. Two synthetic areas were established: I) An area which consists of a central tract which contains a fairly large service center in it and one or more subordinate tracts which are dependent upon the central tract. II) An area which consists of a single tract which is primarily self-sufficient. These two areas are composed of tracts which conform to the following conditions:I) Central tract: a tract which belongs to “A1” in over two of the four indicators.Subordinate tract: 1) a tract which belongs to “C1” in over two of the four indicators. The destination is the same for all indicators belonging to “C1” ; that is, it depends on the same service center for all indicators.