METROPOLITAN
UNIVERSITY
Project Outline
A great number of public buildings were constructed to provide uniform public facility services in Japan in the second half of the 20th century. Public building stock is expected to have the role of local assets. However, the stock is not responding quickly enough to the changing demand for public facilities due to recent rapid changes in Japanese society. As a result, functional, social and institutional deterioration as well as physical deterioration of the stock is caused. For example, due to the rapidly declining birth rate and aging of society, the demand for facilities for elderly people has risen too sharply to satisfy the demand even when the schools and other facilities are used for them. Because user needs have also diversified due to the advancement of mature information society, the functions communal facilities are expected to provide have changed since the time when they were first planned. However, it is difficult to respond to such changes.
It is difficult to expand or rebuild public buildings, which has been the measure to tackle their deterioration, because of financial difficulties and their environmental burdens. Some also point out that rebuilding public buildings without careful consideration destroys the local identity.
Municipal buildings are usually managed by each internal organization, and they try to handle the changing needs in the facility and improvement of functions within the facility group they manage. When there is an empty room in one facility that will fulfill functions that need to be improved in another facility, these organizations cannot make a correct judgment and utilize it. As a result, changing needs have been satisfied by an organization's "ownership" of a new communal facility that satisfies the needs. This is based on the idea of "constructing a building because we have none." As a result, although each municipality has a large number of public facilities, it is hard for them to use them flexibly. Without an assessment and coordination system that grasps the public facilities owned by municipalities as a whole, they cannot be effectively used in a real sense.
Against such backdrop, our research team proposes the evaluation and organization of existing public facilities owned by municipal governments in terms of their functions, locations and buildings to create a public facility network system that matches user needs and municipalities' policy. The system is to help extend the life of existing public buildings, renew them in a flexible manner, and divert them or give them multiple roles, with consideration given to their characteristics, in order to create a self consistent communal facility network to serve as a network of local spatiotemporal networks that continually provide proper public facility services.
We focused on Tama City, Tokyo, as the target area of our research. Tama City owns many public facilities that were constructed in relation to the development of Tama New Town. In this project, we created a database of all of the 126 public facilities the city government owns, analyzed the facility allocation, usage characteristics (rental rooms), physical characteristics, facility operation and management costs and user demand, and proposed the reorganization of the comprehensive public facility service network. The project team, consisting of researchers in various field of architecture, in such specialty areas as facility management (FM), city planning and architectural planning, examined the issue from various perspectives.