Open-space districts in the city planning act of Manchukuo

Abstract

Manchukuo was a Japanese puppet state that existed in northeastern China before World War II. In Manchukuo, city planning was legislated through the Town and Country Planning Act, which was drafted based on the Japanese City Planning Act of 1919 but included ‘open-space districts’ (later ‘open-space areas’), which did not exist in Japanese law at that time. Open- space districts were the first land-use regulations for open space in Japan and its colonies. The current Japanese City Planning Act of 1968 divides city planning areas into urbanisation promotion areas and urbanisation control areas. Many studies in Japan have observed that Japanese city planning techniques and methods were almost complete in the 1930s based on the similarity of the text of open-space areas and urbanisation promotion areas. This study examined the validity of this claim through a comparative analysis of open-space areas in the Manchukuo Town and Country Planning Act and urbanisation control areas in the Japanese City Planning Act of 1968. In terms of dealing with sprawl, open-space areas and urbanisation promotion areas have the same purpose; however, the former was a spatial blockade, while the latter was a land-use guideline based on the assumption that the area would be developed in a planned manner. The latter was also a new technology that compensated for the shortcomings of the former. This paper refutes the widespread claim that Japanese urban planning techniques and methods were largely perfected in the 1930s.