THE LOCALIZATION OF INLAND INDUSTRIAL ESTATES IN THE CHUKYO DISTRICT

Abstract

Recently, the spatial principle of public investments came to have significant influences on the location of plants through the process of establishing industrial estates. The more strictly the city plan restricts the sites of plants with a view to controlling pollutions and noises, the larger the number of plants are needed to be located in a small number of the industrial estates. Therefore, for the further research of the location of plants, it becomes a matter of importance to investigate on the distribution of these estates. In Japan, there are 525 inland industrial estates, covering over 20, 254.4 ha, of which approximately 40.0% are constructed in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, and 9.3% in the northern Kyushu district followed by the Chukyo district. The former two have special public constructors, such as the Japan Housing Corporation and the Coal Producing Regions Devel-opment Corporation. However, the Chukyo district has no special authorities (Fig. I). The first inland industrial estate in the Chukyo district is the Kariya Estate which has started in 1961. By that time big inland industrial estates had already been constructed in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, and many inland estates had spread all over the country, es-pecially in the regional centers of Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima and Fukuoka. In addition to this Kariya estate, four inland industrial estates were constructed at the eastern suburbs of Nagoya City in the Chukyo district. In 1962, the first inland industrial estate of Mie pre-fecture was constructed at Tsu City. Incidentally, many estates of that kind have been con-structed since then. In total, there are 24 estates located in Aichi, 21 in Mie and only 3 in Gifu prefecture (Fig. 2). Except five inland industrial estates in Aichi prefecture, they were constructed by prefectural authorities according with the need of enterprises for industrial sites. It offers a striking contrast to the estates in Mie prefecture. With the exception of five, each of the estates has been constructed by its own local administrator who only tries to attract as many plants as possible. In Gifu prefecture, although each has its own constructor, three estates were placed in order to form a better arrangement of industrial sites (Fig. 3). As to the spatial principle of the location of industrial estates in Gif u prefecture, it selects four economic development areas in the first place, and then to locate the estate in the central city region of each district in consideration of sites which are cheap at their price and near their main road. The localization in the other two prefectures the spatial principle has not been applied so strictly. In Aichi prefecture, there are two different locational fields; one is around the Toyota City formed by the agglomeration force of Toyota Motor Co., and the other is adjacent to Nagoya City due to the dispersing forces of plants located in Nagoya City. Thus, the localization of the estates are affected by these two different forces coming from either of the two locational fields. In Mie prefecture, the distribution of inland industrial estates has been formed not only by socio-economic forces and the need of plants coming from outside of the district, but also by the strong will of each local administrator who seeks for the good locational conditions (Fig. 4, 5, 6, Table 1). The sites of these inland industrial estates are cheap enough and, moreover, are provided with good locational facilities. On such good conditions, many plants are located in anticipation of reducing the loads of noises and pollutions (Table 2-3, 4, 5).