This study aimed to evaluate urban planning-related policies in nine Japanese cities from the perspective of physical activity promotion using indicators of the 1000 Cities Challenge and to indicate the current status of the policies in each city. The results of the evaluation revealed that some policies were linked to physical activity promotion, while others could not necessarily be judged to be intended to promote physical activity from the text. By indicator, all cities had policies to promote physical activity regarding bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, while none had such policies regarding employment distribution or street connectivity.

In order to clarify the relationship of the guiding policies with aimed urban structure and guiding areas in Location Optimization Plans, this paper classified the guiding policies by clustering using natural language processing, and analyzed the characteristics of each type. The guiding policies were classified into three types: station-centered type, non-railway network type, and special type. The station-centered type tended to set up a wide residential guiding areas and to concentrate urban functions in the largest hub. The non-railway network type tended to create an overall vision of connecting urban areas, and tended to narrow the range of residential guiding areas and to create a multicore urban structure.