The impact of high-speed rail on the trajectories of shrinking cities: the case of the extension of the Shinkansen network in northern Japan

ABSTRACT

As more countries witness depopulation, the expansion of High-Speed Rail (HSR) to reach shrinking cities in peripheral regions is renewing the debate on the effects of this infrastructure. This is the case in Japan, a country that continues to extend its highly developed HSR network hoping to curb regional decline. This paper investigates whether HSR had a positive effect on the shrinking trajectories of connected medium and small-sized cities in peripheral regions by examining the impact of extending the Shinkansen network on five municipalities in the prefectures of Iwate and Aomori, northern Japan. Although depopulation decelerated in some of the case studies, the findings highlight that HSR did not reverse shrinkage and benefits are mainly found in increased accessibility, albeit unevenly distributed. This suggests that, rather than uniformly uplifting socio-economic outlooks, the Shinkansen contributed to reshaping the trajectories of the connected cities and reproduced core–periphery dynamics at the regional level.

KEYWORDS:

• Shrinking cities
• high-speed rail
• Japan
• trajectories
• accessibility

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Emma Fushimi for her support in proofreading the paper. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Japanese HSR.

2 A core city is a local administrative division made by the Japanese authorities that includes cities with a population of around 200,000 and that have applied to be recognized as such. Core cities are responsible for the provision of services that would be carried out otherwise by prefectural governments such as welfare, health, education, or city planning.

3 All population and economic data is from the Population Census of Japan (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications). This data accounts for changes that happened in municipalities until the last available census of 2015. The census can be accessed online at https://www.stat.go.jp.

4 According to Condeço-Melhorado, Puebla, and Palomares (2013), this value is usually between 1 and 2. As a detailed study of this parameter is out of the scope of this empirical study, we follow the suggestion of López, Gutiérrez, and Gómez (2008) and set α = 1.

5 As recommended by Mohíno, Ureña, and Solís (2016), internal travel times have been set at ten minutes for the core cities, one minute for municipalities under 10000 inhabitants, and two minutes for the all the others.

6 Accessed 1 July 2019. https://www.eki-net.com.

7 Japan’s population peaked in 2010s census at 128,057,352 persons, and have decreased thereafter.

8 Prefectural income per person in Aomori was JPY 2.405 million; in contrast, Iwate ranked 29th with a prefectural income per person of JPY 2.716 million. The national average is JPY 3.057 million.

9 That is mainly due to the access/ egress time considered in the model.