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Already more than 30 years have passed since the IGC was held in Tokyo. In that time, Japan's cities have gone through major transformations, but that is in large part due to having experienced the appreciation of land values during the bubble economy of the late 1980s. In urban cores during the bubble, land rushes drove prices to appreciate, and that spilled over into the suburbs as well. The supply of residences in suburbs grew, and this facilitated the expansion of business and commercial functions into the suburbs. However, the drop in and stabilisation of land prices following the collapse of the bubble prompted the supply of tower type condominiums in the surrounding areas of CBDs and also had a tremendous impact on the expansion of business function and retail sites. This paper tackles what urban geography involves and what it explains about environmental changes in urban areas of Japan. After the collapse of the bubble, people were impacted on a global scale by synchronised terrorist attacks, the Lehman Shock and other events. The various activities of people living and working in cities often became the focus of urban geographical studies, and that continues to this day. This paper sheds light on that trend in Japan's geography circles.

This paper explains the city planning decisions on building large-scale retail stores outside the built-up areas of Nara. The city approved a strategic plan under the Act on Vitalization of the City Center in conformity with the master plans of Nara prefecture and the city of Nara. Both master plans are aimed at accumulating more stores in the city center and developing retail areas along main roads in order to overcome existing deficiencies. Therefore, planning councils did not examine the negative effects of large-scale stores in the city center and decided that built-up areas should be expanded to accommodate large-scale stores. However, large-scale stores clustered in residential districts and it was clarified that the actual land use does not match the assigned type of zoning.

Classification of retail type in the daytime, 1988 Fa1: high-order functions Fa2: middle-order functions Fa3: fresh-food functions Fa4: low order functions Fa5: automobile row functions and gasoline stations The numbers correspond to those of trade type shown in Table 1.