[URBAN NOTE] "Bankrupt Mining Town Downsizes to Avoid Becoming a Ghost"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Chikako Mogi and Yuki Hagiwara describe how the Hokkaido coal town of Yubari is trying to downside.

A sleepy, former coal-mining town in northern Japan is taking unprecedented measures to combat its biggest challenge: a devastating shrinking of its population. Its success could decide the future for hundreds of other local governments waging the same battle for survival.

Since its peak in the post-war economic boom of the 1960s, the population of Yubari, a little more than an hour’s drive east of Sapporo on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, has declined by more than 90 percent to just 9,000 as older residents died and young people moved away to bigger cities. Ten years ago, it became Japan’s first municipality to declare bankruptcy.

To keep from becoming a so-called ghost town—when a city ceases to function due to a precipitous decline in population and is ultimately abandoned—Yubari embarked on a drastic experiment. City officials began merging schools, slashing government jobs and salaries, halting funds for public swimming pools, toilets and parks, curtailing services such as bus routes and snow removal, and downgrading the local hospital to a clinic. The most drastic measure has been the forced relocation of hundreds of residents from public housing on the city’s outskirts to blocks of new, low-rise apartments closer to the city center.

“Yubari can potentially lead the example of a real-time compact city,” said Yoshio Kurihara, senior researcher at Mitsui Global Strategic Studies Institute in Tokyo, who called Yubari’s experiment an “extremely important” model for Japan. “Successful results from the city’s trial can be applied on a nationwide scale.”