Auswirkungen von Zersiedlung auf Infrastrukturausgaben in Nagoya und München – eine Vergleichsstudie

Impact of Urban Sprawl on Public Cost for Infrastructure in Nagoya and Munich – a Comparative Study

When addressing sustainable urban development, the issue of social costs has recently attracted attention, due to socio-economic development in many societies. Thus, public costs of utility and infrastructure provision and fiscal impacts of population and urban development have been discussed on the regional and local level. Many German and Japanese cities are facing growing investment needs and rising maintenance costs for existing infrastructure. A multilevel comparative analysis, carried out for the growing regions of Munich and Nagoya, results in the confirmation of the hypothesis, that sprawled communities have to bear higher public costs per capita. However a clearly different level of investment- and maintenance costs has been found. The findings imply that major infrastructure investment should be undertaken with careful consideration of follow-up costs, and still-existing growing forces should be used to guide urban development in a more compact way.