street café has been opened in Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo. Other Town Development efforts are also in progress in other parts of Japan with partnership between the public and private sectors. PFI project procedures have been launched to allow private entrepreneurs to maintain, manage and run directly the parking spaces owned by the MLIT in pursuit of better user convenience, less costs of administration and management.

## General Endeavors to Realize an Intensive Urban Structure

As the population declines and gets aged, the importance of realizing an intensive urban structure emerges to address the issues of the global environment, simplify urban management and so on. This task should call for concentrating vital urban livelihood facilities, such as medical, nursery, welfare, educational and cultural, in central urban districts and around transport nodes to augment the convenience of public transport and to maintain opportunities of diverse forms of concentration, festivity and human interaction. An intensive urban structure would allow access to services from anywhere in the city and further the creation of new industries or more jobs. Additional benefits might include promoting “Town Development with living in a walking sphere,” which depends on walking on foot, bicycles and public transport, and abating environmental loads through the more efficient use of energies, etc. taking advantage of the concentration.

The MLIT supports regional and urban Town Development by diverse approaches, including promoting Comprehensive Transport Strategy. That call for increased use of public transport facilities, better transport nodes and the development of a bicycle use environment and an animated pedestrian space, promoting urban area development strategies, such as forming intensive urban centers, as by city center revitalization and encouraging town residence and restricting the development of new urban areas, utilizing natural and untapped energy sources, developing city parks and forming networks of greens as by preserving and creating green spaces and greening public facilities, etc.

Graphic II-4-2-1 Schematic of an Intensive Urban Structure

Further, the “Low Carbon City Act”

was enacted in December 2012. This legislation introduced a system of certification of buildings designed to facilitate low carbonization in urban areas or elsewhere, plus a “system of low-carbon city plan,” which encourages municipalities to work out plans that make for low-carbon urban development. These two systems are expected to drive “compact city plan” as a partnership among administrative authorities, citizens and private entrepreneurs.

## 3 Urban Planning and Infrastructures Development Taking Advantage of Regional Characteristics

## (1) Emergency development of urban planning roads instrumental in encouraging private investment

The development of urban planning roads is significantly instrumental in facilitating urban renewal because it encourages the reconstruction, etc. of roadside buildings. For those routes under construction whose completion is bottlenecked because of only a small lot of land yet to be purchased, the local governments (project implementing entities) announce their pledges to complete the construction within a certain period of time (completion time declaration routes; as of April 1, 2012, 439 routes were declared by 126 project implementing entities) to speed up the development of the project benefits.