Kohoku New Town (Center-Kita) about 60 years ago and today

History of Kohoku New Town (Center-Kita)

The center of Kohoku New Town lies in the north of the City of Yokohama, among the hills that form the southern part of the Tama Hills. The place name Center-Kita comes from the name of the station placed on the north side of that central district. The hills are made of many ridges and the narrow valleys cutting between them, and for a long time the land was divided in use, with rice fields on the valley floors and fields and woods on the ridges. At this location the aerial photographs are available for six eras, and the four eras from 1974-78 to 1987-90 are consecutive. It is a location where you can follow, frame by frame every few years, a planned town in the middle of being built.

The elevation figures show that the center of the location is on the valley side. The center at 23.7 m, the south at 22.7 m and the west at 22.4 m line up at almost the same height, rising to 35.4 m in the north and 38.6 m in the east. There is a difference of about 16 m between east and west, and this difference is the difference in height between ridge and valley. The center of the planned town sits on the surface rising east from the center that has come down to the valley side.

Rice fields tracing the yato valleys

The 1961-69 aerial photograph is black and white and grainy. In the upper left and lower left of the frame, the seams where photographs were joined remain as square differences in tone. The photograph shows hills all over. Dark gray tree crowns cover the backs of the ridges, and between ridge and ridge bright bands split into two and three branches and narrow as they go in. The bands are rice paddies on the valley floors; they narrow toward the upstream end and vanish at dead ends. The shape of the branching bright bands directly traces the lines along which the hills collect water. On the ridges, fields divided into squares are laid out together, and the lots line up with the direction of the ridges. Thin white roads thread through ridges and valleys, and roofs a few houses at a time are dotted along them. From the lower half of the frame to the lower right, strip-shaped paddies spread widely together, and a flat surface continues only there. Neither grid streets nor straight railway tracks can be seen anywhere.

The 1974-78 photograph is in color. However, the tone is divided into three horizontal bands, yellowish brown at the top, greenish brown in the middle and dark blue-green at the bottom, with clear borders. This is because each band was taken on a different day, and if you look at it as a record of a single day, you will misread it. In this era the north end of the frame first catches the eye. Toward the center, a residential area with roofs lined up along concentric streets appears as a group. The ring streets came first, and the surface that will become the center of the planned town is still untouched. From the center downward, the paddies on the valley floors and the fields on the ridges continue in almost the same layout as in 1961-69; the only changes are that a long, narrow strip of brown bare ground has appeared around the upper center, and that roofs have begun to line the road from the left edge toward the middle.

In the 1979-83 photograph the color bands disappear, and the whole frame has a uniform tone. The layout of valleys and ridges has not changed yet, but bright bare ground opens in two places. In the lower left corner and the upper right corner, both have the color of ground just exposed by clearing trees. The residential area with ring streets at the north end has more roofs, and the road running south from it grows wider. The valley in the center is still paddies in this era too, and placing the two photographs side by side, you can read that development began in the corners of the frame.

Valleys turned to soil

In the 1984-86 photograph, the center turns to soil all at once. From the middle of the frame to the upper right, wide reddish bare ground connects in one stretch, and neither the paddies on the valley floors nor the woods on the ridges can be told apart. Across that surface, a straight band of bright color passes straight through from north-northeast to south-southwest. It is a line that cuts through the hills without bending, in contrast to the roads of the earlier eras, which were all curves tracing valleys and ridges. In the upper center a long, narrow water surface appears, and inside the bare ground toward the right there is a reddish-brown surface dug down. In the lower left, long white buildings form rows facing the same way, and terraced flat areas are cut around them. The scene of the work of leveling the hills and filling the valleys comes out most vividly in this photograph.

A surface of nothing but lots

In the 1987-90 photograph, fine lines appear on the bare ground. Slightly left of the center, small lots of the same size line up neatly, and from the center to the right only the lines of the lot divisions are drawn on a wide, greenish flat area. There are still few buildings, and the surfaces with lines drawn on them spread out empty. The straight line running north-south through the center has a clear roadbed shape, and roads crossing it also appear. In the upper center, a group of woods and a small water surface have been left, and amid the surroundings turned to soil, the green floats like an island. The left edge and the lower left are already built-up residential areas, and rows of apartment buildings are extending. In the upper right corner a new brown development surface has opened, and in the middle of the bottom edge there is a large square flat area. The order in which the lots were made first and the buildings came in later shows in how empty this photograph is.

A station where two lines meet

The station came to the center of the town in 1993. That year Yokohama Municipal Subway Line 3 was extended, and Center-Kita Station was placed. In 2008 Line 4 opened, and the two lines came to meet at this station. The device for drawing people to the surface that had been nothing but lot divisions thus came in after the last era of the aerial photographs. In 1994 Tsuzuki Ward was created in a reorganization of the City of Yokohama's administrative wards, and this area came within it.

In today's photograph, almost the whole frame is urban area. A straight bright line passes through the center from north-northeast to south-southwest, and there are two long, narrow structures on the line. It is a line that overlaps exactly, in both position and direction, the straight band that cut through the hills in 1984-86. Buildings with large single roofs gather around the line, making it the place with the densest buildings in the frame. In the upper center a round pond and a band of woods remain, and the green that floated like an island in 1987-90 keeps its shape as it was. From the left edge to the lower left, a mass of dark green and a few lots of brown fields remain. The green along the valleys was left, and the upper right and lower right are residential areas with trees dotted between the streets.

A residential site in Ushikubo-higashi 1-chome is 259 m away. Here the figures are available from 2020, starting at 340,000 yen per square meter, and in the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji) it is 433,000 yen. The low end is the starting year and the high end the final year, and the ratio between the two ends is 1.27 times. Near the center of a planned town developed decades ago, this is a period in which the value rose by that margin.

The elevation of the center of the location is 23.7 m, about 15 m lower than the eastern ridge. Because the surface leveled by cutting hills and filling valleys is wide, walls that hold back the height stand for long stretches beside the roads. The places where the water collects follow the shape of the valleys before they were filled. The areas of expected flooding and the landslide warning zones can be read as color divisions on the City of Yokohama's hazard map.