Spatial Structures of Planning Areas within Prefectures Viewed from the Correspondence of Them to Urban Systems

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The results studied consist of three papers. The first paper deals with the relations between regional urban systems and prefectural territories. Analyzing the migration population among cities middle- and small-size cities mostly have close connections with cities in their own prefectures, except for the surrounding prefectures of metropolises. Thus, we can safely say that Japan is a country with regional urban systems highly developed in the frame of prefectures. And then, the hierarchical structures of regional urban systems are characterized by territories in clan age and the geographical locations of the present Japan. In the second paper we considered the development process of intermediate administrative areas from gun-system to the present system. The comparison between these intermediate administrative areas and wider-area municipal spheres and/or secondary medical care regions revealed that the latter has generally larger areas and relates closer to intermediate administrative areas than the former. Therefore, it seems to be difficult for secondary medical care regions to play an important role as planning regions of medical care. In the third paper we set up urban tributary areas of central cities with 3000 workers of central functions by measuring central functions and their commuting data and consider the relationship between them and wider-area municipal spheres. As a result we recognized various types of the relationships. Prefectures with a stable feature of regional urban system tend to closely correspond each other.