An Examination of the Evaluation on the Educational Roles of Urban Facilities for Regional Sustainability

<p>　　Regional sustainability is an urgent issue in Japan, where population decline is rapidly progressing.　An area cannot be maintained without urban facilities that support various activities.　It is very difficult for an area with a population decline to maintain urban facilities because of the insufficient budget.　However, needless to say, a budget is required to maintain urban facilities, but citizens’ understanding and cooperation are also important.　For example, in order to maintain a waste disposal system, it is necessary for people to properly separate garbage and make efforts to reduce waste.　Furthermore, it is necessary to provide a budget for maintaining the system from waste collection to the final disposal.　These are maintained by the understanding and cooperation of citizens who are the waste generators, taxpayers, voters involved in decision-making, and finally as residents accepting facility locations that are often regarded as so-called nuisance facilities.　Urban facilities have multi-functions.　They have not only their original functions but also wider functions, which are significantly important for the community, such as symbolizing the wisdom and hardship of the ancestors, cultural assets and local characteristic features. They make up the local landscape and convey the local memories.　The questionnaire surveys of water treatment facilities and waste treatment facilities showed that many of them play an educational role in the area.　There is a significant correlation between these functions and the amount of effort and the number of collaborations.　We think that urban facilities have museum-like functions.　The sustainability of the region, including population migration, population composition, and socio-economic activities, depends on “people”.　Urban facilities contribute to the sustainability of the community through efforts to work on “people” in addition to their original functions.　The significance of the museum-like functions of city facilities is as follows.　The first is the role of disaster prevention education and environmental education for a wide range of citizens.　The second is to convey local memories and lessons learned from ancestors and history. The third role is to provide a place for communication between citizens and city facility managers.　Education is emphasized in some sustainability assessment, indicators such as the SDGs, but the evaluation index is based only on school education.　The contribution of urban facilities to local sustainability should be appropriately assessed by sustainability indicators.　We need to consider assessing the contribution of urban facilities to local sustainability through museum-like functions.</p><p>JEL Classifications:H41, H49, I29</p>