Page 469 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Japanese Smart Communities as Industrial Policy Chapter j 21 439

NSS a legitimacy that transcended its predecessor documents. On top of that
legitimacy was legal authority: at least 20 other national laws are obligated to
refer to the NSS (OECD, 2016, pp. 79e80). In turn, the NSS is obliged to
reference the NRP.
Compared with its 2008 iteration (not to mention earlier national plans),
the 2015 NSS devoted much attention to how Japan’s energy, demographic,
climate, and other challenges can be alleviated through smart communities,
renewable energy, resilience, and related initiatives. In spatial terms, the 2015
NSS stressed the need to build (in ascending order of size) “small stations”
(chiisana kyoten) in rural areas, “sustainable residential areas” (teijuu jiritsu
ken) within cities, and “collaborative core urban areas” (renkei chusuu toshi
ken) across cities. All of these spatial forms underscore the multiple benefits of
concentrating public services (such as medical, welfare, and elderly care fa-
cilities) in compact nodes and clusters. Such densification encourages greater
energy efficiency and disaster resilience.
The 2015 NSS paid careful attention to smart and distributed energy
because its design team included Kashiwagi as its first-ever energy expert and
he made a point of emphasizing smart communities and smart energy systems
(Kashiwagi, 2015). Considering Japan’s vulnerability when it comes to energy,
it is rather surprising that its previous spatial planning initiatives did not
include an energy expert. However, in fact, few countries integrate these policy
domains, which is why the European Commission set up the Spatial Planning
and Energy for Communities In All Landscapes project from March 2013 to
March 2016 (SPECIAL, 2013).

POLICY INTEGRATION IN THE COMPACT CITY
Policy integration on building compact cities is an additional development
that is amplifying collaboration and the effective use of scarce fiscal, human,
and other resources. Fig. 21.6 outlines the compact city and role of the
“Locational Optimization Plan.” As in virtually all Japanese smart commu-
nity projects, policy integration between energy and spatial planning has
encouraged robust policies to foster densification, to help cope with depop-
ulation and aging in the context of accelerating climate change and other
hazards.
The administrative agency to achieve this integration is also in place, via
the Compact-City Design Assistance Team (CCDAT). The CCDAT was
developed in March 2015 under the auspices of the Comprehensive Strategy
for Regional Development, which itself was given Cabinet assent on
December 27, 2014. The CCDAT is centered on the Ministry of Land, Infra-
structure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), but it also includes representation
from 10 other agencies, including METI and MOE. This broad representation
is deliberate because designing the compact city requires addressing energy,
disaster resilience, interregional cooperation, urban farming, education, health