National Conference of the City Planning Institute of Japan @Osaka
[18 November 2018]
Mr. Tsuru, an alumnus of our lab, presented the his master’s thesis at the 2018 National Conference of the City Planning Institute of Japan (CPIJ) that held from 16th to 18th November. He adopted an analytical model for predicting the number of newly established retail store locations and withdrawals in a provincial city on a detailed spatial basis. We would like to thank all the participants for their comments at his presentation. The content of his research has also been published as the following paper.
T., Tsuru, & D., Fukuda. (2018). Determinants of establishment and closing decisions for small retail stores in a provincial city. Journal of the City Planning Institute of Japan, 53(3), 1529-1536. (English version Japanese version)
The abstract of the paper is shown as follows.
The hollowing out of the central urban area in local cities is an urgent problem. In order to solve the problem, in local hub cities nationwide “Urban Facility Location Plan” is being planned and implemented. With this background, the objective of this study is to empirically and comprehensively reveal the factor that the retail store establish or close in local hub cities. For that, we construct a count data model that can predict the number of establishment and closing of retail stores in the detailed 1 km mesh level to analyze the impact of implementation of urban planning in detailed regional units. Based on the parameter estimation results, the size of the commercial area has a positive influence on the number of establishments, whereas it has a negative effect on the number of closings. The distance to the large shopping mall has negative effects on both the number of establishments and closings. We also find that in the central urban area the spatial effect parameter of the closing model tends to be positive suggesting that closing in neighboring areas may prompt closing in the current mesh. Finally, with the implementation of Urban Facility Location Plan in mind, we estimated the influence of induction of large commercial facilities to the central urban area on the number of locations and closings at retail stores.
