Evaluation　of　Public　Green　Space Placement Plans as an Indicator of Urban Density　of　Japan’s　Three　Major　Metropolitan Areas

City areas in Japan and other countries in East and Southeast Asia, as compared to those in the United States and Europe, are extremely dense and the lack of green spaces has long been pointed out as a serious problem. Green spaces constitute an integral part of a regional environment, serving diverse functions such as environment preservation, recreation, disaster prevention, and landscape formation. Furthermore, as a lesson learned from the Great Hanshin Earthquake(1995), the risk of living in a highly dense city has come to be widely recognized in Japan, and it has been pointed out that there is an acute need to preserve green spaces as a foundation for securing adequate disaster prevention capability in the urban living environment. This study aims to evaluate, as an indicator of urban density, plans for placement of green spaces in Japan’s three major metropolitan areas, focusing on public green spaces – such as parks and urban green areas – among various kinds of green spaces. For that, I first try to capture and assess the pattern of public green space distribution, using GIS (Geographic Information System s). Then, based on the assessment results, I evaluate plans for placement of public green spaces as an indicator of urban density and sort out the findings by distance zone (as classified based on distance from the city center) so as to conduct a comparison and further examination. Furthermore, based on the evaluation results, I propose remedial measures feasible for implementation in the three metropolitan areas of Japan