Hiroyuki Kohsaka

A monitoring and locational decision support system for retail activity

In this paper a monitoring and locational decision support system for retail activity is presented. This system uses point-based customer densities as a set of data instead of area-based densities which have been used in most of the previous studies. Bicubic spline gridding and interpolation methods are applied to convert sample data to grid data and to convert grid data to grid data, respectively. Retail trade areas are represented as a three-dimensional surface in colour graphics to monitor the small changes. This system can also search for an optimal location for an intended store and assess its spatial impacts upon the existing stores by means of a spatial interaction model with bicubic splines.

Applications of GIS to urban planning and management: Problems facing Japanese local governments

Japanese local governments consist of about 3,380 municipalities in 2000. The total survey undertaken in 1997 says that GIS was implemented in 455 (14.3%) out of 3,182 municipalities that answered to the survey. This paper considers GIS utilization, especially focusing on urban planning and management in Japanese local government. Typical GIS applications in the urban planning and management are divided into three businesses: inquiry on the content of urban plan decision, register management, and planning. The most successful GIS application in the local government is an inquiry system on the content of urban plan decision. ‘Mappy’, Urban Plan Information Inquiry System developed by Yokohama City, is introduced as an example. The register management treats the registers for urban planned road, urban park, and urban open space, and the receipt book for development permission application. GIS can systematize their management based on maps. District diagnosis system using GIS performed two analyses in Ichikawa City. One is the calculation of area and ratio for land-use. The other is the measurement of land-use purity. GIS can calculate the degree of purity (namely occupancy rate) of specified land-use in the land-use zoning system. Most of Japanese local governments implement GIS and obtain moderate results. However, it is reported that some municipalities that paid huge amount of budget to implement GIS hardly used them. The final section will consider various issues in the use of administrative GIS.

Monitoring and analysis of a retail trading area by a card information/GIS approach

Abstract Integrated circuit (IC) cards have already been introduced as points cards in the shopping streets and centres of Japan. This paper attempts to monitor and analyse the trade area of a specific shopping street by inputting the buying information obtained from points card into a geographic information system. Karasuyama Station Shopping Street in the western suburbs of Tokyo was selected as the study area. The conditions of the trading area for the shopping street were analysed using the card information/GIS approach. It became clear that the information on the formation of the trading area represented by this approach is valuable in promoting the marketing activities of retailers and manufacturers.

An Analysis of Competitive Oscillations between Japanese Twin Cities

In this paper keenly-competing Japanese twin cities are examined and the competitive oscillations occurring between them is analyzed as a typical example of medium-term competitive processes. From an analysis of market shares for annual retail sales of womens and childrens clothes it was found that there are certain oscillations between the twin cities. As these oscillations are derived from the strong competition between closely-located twin cities, they are called competitive oscillations. In order to analyze the generation of the competitive oscillations, an attempt to reproduce a strongly competitive condition by constructing a dynamic model of two-centre competition was made. As the twin cities share a large part of their populations, they are under strong competitive conditions in which major retail development at one city produces an absolute loss to the other city. Therefore, the twin cities seesaw through the introduction of innovations such as large shops in order to gain a more advantageous competitive position, resulting in competitive oscillations between them. This finding implies that the introduction of innovation to centres is a competitive device in the medium-term and is consistent with the view that the diffusion of innovation is closely related to the competitive process.