The suburbanization of office location in the Tokyo Metropolis

Abstract

In recent years, the understanding of the processes of the suburbanization of office location has long been a major foci of discussion in urban geography. However, few studies have analyzed why large, high status office buildings have developed in the metropolitan suburbs.The purpose of this study is to investigate the supply and management of large office buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan suburbs. The analysis is based on a questionnaire survey of tenant offices in Omiya Sonic City, one of the earliest large office buildings in the suburbs.The paper can be summarized as follows:Office workers and office space stocks have steadily increased since 1990 in suburban core cities. However, there are regional differences in the temporal fluctuation of the rental ratio of office space. In particular, there has been a tendency for an improvement in the rental ratio of office space following the prominence of the bubble economy in Omiya city, one of the suburban core cities.Omiya Sonic City is a 'smart-building', which was developed by a joint enterprise of private office developers and the public sector. As this building has attracted many tenants, the rental ratio has kept to a high average since it opened in 1988. The building maintains this high rental ratio by attracting many branch offices of headquarters located in central Tokyo. These branch offices have played an important role in the regional business base of the northern Tokyo metropolitan region.The reasons why these tenant offices rent their spaces in this building are not only due to its good location and easy access to both the northern region and central business district in the Tokyo metropolitan region, but also to the fact that Omiya Sonic City is the highest status building in the suburbs.As the building's owners invited many tenant offices, they surveyed office market trends in suburban areas in detail. Based on this survey, they decided to invite branch offices of headquarters located mainly in central Tokyo. As a result, Omiya Sonic City succeeded in inviting many superior tenant offices.Recent studies have already pointed out that various 'back offices' carrying programmed works using telecommunications have moved from downtown to the suburbs because they do not need face-to-face contact in downtown. However, this study shows that the suburbanization of office locations is caused not by decentralized back-offices but by new suburban branch office locations.To comprehend the processes of the suburbanization of office location in more detail, future studies must consider examples of large office buildings at other suburban core cities.