Who Should Maintain Unused Public Lands? : To Foster Citizens' Behaviours Based on Private and Local Needs in Order to Overcome Public Issues on Japanese Context

This research focuses on who should maintain unused public lands. It is well known that the unused public lands have caused the around people undesirable impacts, and it has been necessity to overcome this problem as a serious public issue all over the world. In Japan, some reports express that a small number of unused public lands have been changed to neighbourhood parks or community gardens which are temporarily available, based on the contracts between local people and municipal offices. On the other hand, Saitama City Office in Japan established an ordinance to use unused public lands as the multi-purpose square in 2010. Moreover, the Office suggested the condition which it is needed by citizen groups to offer the maintenance and management of the lands before the Office introduces the squares in each land. And then, there are 13 multi-purpose squares at present. We had promoted interview with the member of the citizen groups from 2014 to 2015.

It seems that the citizen groups have the shared value with Saitama City Office which wants to enhance the function of the multi-purpose square. However, most citizen groups have reasons, which do not correspond to the Office’s demand, based on each private and local need such as to avoid negative impact caused by the construction of tall buildings even after they will be sold. Therefore, citizen groups hope to establish the multi-purpose squares and to keep a moderate function of them with minimal costs for the maintenance and management, and the Office does actively not require paying a large amount of their cost. Consequently, there are a lot of citizen groups which are able to take part in the maintenance and management of the lands, and then the number of multi-purpose squares has increased there.