The Changing “Face of the City”: Homogenization and Accumulation of Amenities

A city has various faces, and those faces change along with the era. The various faces include a young face when a city has just been born by development and the like, a lively and radiant maturing face, and face that has matured with the passage of time but now features many wrinkles. So by what is it that these faces are differentiated from one another? What is the face of the city composed of? Our faces are composed of a contour, eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears and hair. The contour of a city is defined by the things that it is born with, like the shape of that city and the neighboring cities, and nature, such as the sea, mountains and the river that flows through the city.

In this study, I set out from the similarity and heterogeneity of the amenities for the whole of Japan with individual data from the “Yellow Pages” to clarify how to be able to classify these in types of faces of cities. Moreover, based on such a classification, I clarify empirically what kinds of faces the regions where population has been accumulating have by superimposing the small region data (500 meter mesh) of the national census. In other words, I will show what kinds of cities have popular faces.

Based on the above analysis, I estimate by the framework of hedonic theory the extent of the effects that such an accumulation of population has on pushing up land prices. That is, the purpose of this study is to measure the economic value accompanying the accumulation of amenities through the above series of analyses.