The Recent Growth of Wakayama City

Abstract

The urban growth of Wakayama City since 1955 is pursued after in this article from the view-point of population phenomenon. Wakayama City, the capital of Wakayama Prefecture, is situated, about 60km south from Osaka City, at the peripherial part of the Osaka Metropolitan Region, which is the second largest scope in Japan.According to the primary consideration that the subject of the area study should be fully grasped through the comprehensive scrutiny between more than two different scales, first, it has started to deal with the theme of the urban growth from the two angles: situation and hierarchy, and then examined its autonomy and heteronomy. Consulting these indicatives such as commuting and attending school, shopping of personal effects and population drift, it has reached to the conclusion that Wakayama City has fulfilled its own autonomic urban growth to an extensive degree, although having been incessantly affected from the negative impact from Osaka City. Besides it, it is also pointed out, as main factors of such autonomic urban growth, the enlargement of population scale at the Sumitomo Metalworking Industry Wakama Plant, one of the most prominent coastal iron foundry in the world and its product amount of the blister steel per year is 6, 150, 000ton, as well as the urban functional expansion under the impact of the Plant's activity.Next, in treating each 40 administrative sections as a unit area, the urban growth of Wakayama City is studied in the light of population growth rate, net migration rate and gross migration rate etc. Since 1960 following schema of circular structure has been perceived, centering on some spots at the inner part of the city as nuclei, where the sporadic depopulation is already coming out in the shape of doughnut. Several sections, where the population growth rate is lessening, spread around the central nuclear spots, and at the outer side there are distributed the more urbanized zone with denser population and higher migration rate; then at its further exterior place, expand the localities where just have presented the population increasing and ascending of the migration rate. Finaally, at the most peripherial outside of the city there are left the regions where still keep the reducing trend of population. For all that, these farm regions are already undergoing the influence of urbanization: the side jobs are considerably carrying on in commuting to the city. Thus, nowadays aerial and social structure of the farm village are speedingly transfiguring in the regional frame of the urban control from the city's side. Consequently, there is no doubt that the above-mentioned schema of circular structure is dynamic. The region of accumulated population divides into two divisions: the one is where the Sumitomo Metalworking Industry and its allied factories had brought about it as an immediate factor, the other is where it was turned up by other factors not directly doing with their industrial activities. This is the peculiarity of the urban growth in Wakayama City.