Managing Urban and Rural Agricultural Landscape Processes in Japan

In Japan, the goal of land use policy, which was established in the City Planning Act in 1968 and the Act on Establishment of Agricultural Promotion Regions in 1969, was to divide the urban and rural area by zoning in the expanding periods, but many researchers have pointed out that it has failed and urban sprawl has expanded in the urban periphery areas due to loose land use regulations. However, today in the shrinking periods, the need of diversion of agricultural land to residential land is declining. On the other hands, urban residents have recently shown more interest in the food safety and the urban agriculture, and the expectation to the various ecological services of agricultural fields in urban area such as disaster prevention, environmental improvement, and landscape preservation has been increasing. Under these circumstances, Urban Agriculture Promotion Basic Plan was established in 2015 and Urban Green Space Conservation Law was revised in 2017. This chapter introduces the laws and some recent attempts of urban agriculture from the following four points; (1) To promote further entry of various motivated entities into agriculture such as urban residents, and companies which promote new agricultural businesses, (2) To evaluate the mixture of urban and rural areas positively by regarding urban agricultural fields not as “the place to be developed” but as “the place to be preserved”, (3) To improve the self-sufficiency rate by the high technology collection, and (4) To balance the productivity and the biological diversity by branding of the environmentally-friendly agriculture.