Tendency of Small Scale of Municipal Primary Schools and the Change of Spatial Structure of Local Communities in the Metropolitan Cities in Japan.

日本11个大都市的中心和副中心地区出现了市立小学小规模的趋势。这一趋势在京都、大阪神户和基塔九州尤为明显。尽管所有城市都应该有很多多余的教室，但东京的一些学区却没有多余的教室。城市富余教室的改造形式多种多样，很多情况下是将富余教室改建为专用教室、午餐室、管理室等，供学校使用。在其他一些情况下，这些设施被重建为功能性综合设施，供社区使用。特别是当东京一些中心区的小型学校合并后，新建筑被建成为后者。后者的另一个典型案例是横滨部分校舍改建而成的社区住房的小规模改造。从社区使用学校设施的使用情况调查来看，学校作为功能组合设施没有得到充分利用，但在开放学校设施项目上得到了充分利用。人们认为，社区使用的功能组合设施是最近才建成的，当地社区的许多人都不知道。然而，与横滨的情况一样，那里的学校重建工作比其他城市更早开始，社区住房密集，发现市立小学被认为是许多人终身学习的设施之一，学校和其他设施之间存在功能上的相互关系。

The tendency of small scale of municipal primary schools was found in the central and sub-central areas of 11 metropolitan cities in Japan. The tendency was remarkable in Kyoto, Osaka Kobe and Kita-Kyushu. Although there should have been many surplus classrooms in all cities, some wards in Tokyo had no surplus classrooms. There were wide variety of styles of rebuilding of surplus classrooms in cities, In many cases, the surplus classrooms were rebuilt to special classrooms, lunch rooms, management rooms and so on for school use. In some other cases, those were rebuilt to functional combined facilities for community use. Especially when the small schools were combined in some central wards of Tokyo, the new buildings were built as the latter. Another typical case of the latter was the small rebuilding to community houses which were rebuilt from a part of school buildings in Yokohama.From the investigation of the usage of school facilities for community use, the schools were not fully used as the functional combined facilities, but used sufficiently on the project of opening school facilities. It is considered that the functional combined facilities for community use were built recently and not known for many people in local communities. However, as was the case of Yokohama, where the rebuilding of schools was begun earlier than in other cities and the community houses were densely located, it was found that the municipal primary schools were recognized as one of the lifelong learning facilities for many people and there were functional interrelationship between schools and other facilities.