The Revised Town Planning Act and Right, Planning and Control of Urban Land Use

Revisions of the Town Planning Act in 1999 and 2000, provide many new land use planning tools as well as provisions concerning decentralization of planning powers. In this article, the author focuses on and discusses the revised land use planning systems. As for the land use planning, the revision in 2000, mainly deals with land use planning in suburban and rural areas. For examples, a new planning area called Quasi Town Planning Area, in which limited zoning systems can be used, are provided to the outside of Town Planning Areas and the planning permission system, which have been limited to the Town Planning Areas, become applicable to all over the country. These new provisions seem to be useful to control urban sprawls in the region, however, because of insufficient system to use these disconnected planning tools, there remain many loopholes to urban sprawls. More over introduction of many new planning tools make the planning system very complicated one which is inappropriate to the citizen=s participation.