"Interactive" Relationship between the Municipal Master Plan and the Local Community Building (Machizukuri) Activity

Many studies on the municipal master plan have been developed in the last few years. They were mainly focused on various issues in the process of making the master plan, including how to reflect people's opinions in the plan. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between the master plan and the local community building (machizukuri) activity after a master plan is made. The analysis of two cases of different local initiatives shows that such a relation is "Interactive". One is the plan's "break-down" role to guide the urban image of locality and to lead the individual concrete planning decisions; the other which we think is very important is the local activity's "bottom-up" role to feed back various practical issues to the master plan.