Chiba New Town Chuo about 60 years ago and today

History of Chiba New Town Chuo

Chiba New Town Chuo lies in northern Chiba Prefecture, on the Shimosa Plateau. The surface of the plateau was fields and woods, land cut by narrow valleys like branches. The name Chiba New Town is the name of the project to build a residential city on this plateau, and the name of the station placed in its central district has become the name of the location as it is. At this location the four eras from 1974-78 to 1987-90 come one after another, with 1961-69 before them. The process of the town's framework being drawn on the plateau is split across these four photographs.

The elevation figures show that the center of the location sits not on the plateau surface but in a hollow. The center is 16.8 m, while the west is 24.9 m, the east 23.8 m, the south 23.2 m and the north 22.7 m, so all four directions are above 22 m. Only the center falls in a valley, and the flat plateau surface surrounds it.

A plateau of fields and woods

The 1961-69 aerial photograph is black and white and grainy. The photograph shows nothing but fields, woods and valleys. On the plateau surface, fields divided into squares gather in pale gray, and the direction of the lots is uniform in each place. The valleys cutting the surface branch as they descend, their edges outlined by dark gray tree crowns, and long, narrow bright lots line the valley floors. In the lower half of the frame, long, narrow lots overlap in many lines tracing the slopes, and the cut surface looks wider than the flat surface. Houses gather at the top edge of the frame, in the upper right, and beside the roads along the valleys, in groups of a few to a dozen or so. Neither streets laid out in a grid nor straight railway lines are in the frame in this era.

The 1974-78 photograph is in color. However, the tone is divided into three horizontal bands, brown at the top, a pale greenish yellow in the middle, and dark green and ocher at the bottom, with clear borders. This is because the photographs were taken at different times for different places, and it is better not to view them as one photograph from a single day. In this era the upper left of the frame first catches the eye. A cluster of fine grid lots appears, and the color of the ground has changed only in that part. In the middle a wide bright band is drawn diagonally, and the area south of it is a flat surface covered with grass, where the divisions of the fields have vanished. The lots were drawn from the top of the plateau first. Meanwhile, the lower half of the frame also has a different layout from the previous era: on the flat surface in the lower right, many wide roads cross diagonally, and in the lower left a bright, smooth band reaches in between the dark woods. The long, narrow lots that traced the slopes in 1961-69 are hard to make out in these two places.

A surface where the lots came first

In the 1979-83 photograph the color bands disappear, and development reaches the middle of the frame. Roofs begin to enter the grid in the upper left, and reddish-brown bare ground continues south of it. In the center, thin white lines are drawn in a mesh, and surfaces where only lots have been made and no buildings have come in spread out. From there a wide bright band passes through to the northeast. Meanwhile, in the lower right of the frame a section appears where many long, narrow buildings facing the same way form rows, and west of it a long, narrow gray water surface extends south. The lower left carries over the layout of dark woods and a bright, smooth band, and the surfaces where lines were drawn in this era are limited to the top of the plateau.

A station in the bare ground

The 1984-86 photograph is the most striking at this location. From the middle of the frame upward is ocher bare ground all over, and neither the divisions of the fields nor the woods of the valleys can be told apart. A straight band crosses that bare ground from lower left to upper right. Fine notches like railway sleepers line the band, and if you zoom in, a single long, narrow, low roof sits partway along it. A road drawing a circle is attached south of the roof, and from there wide roads extend in two directions. These are the station and the plaza in front of it. There are almost no buildings around them, and this photograph alone shows that the station stood before the town. Within the bare ground there are also traces dug down in circles and flat areas cut in tiers. The residential area in the upper left of the frame is densely filled with roofs, and in the upper right a wide development surface lined with stripes has opened.

A town drawing toward the tracks

In the 1987-90 photograph, part of the bare ground has returned to the green of grass, and the lines of the lot divisions read more clearly than in the previous era. Several white-roofed buildings have been placed north and east of the station, and a cluster of small buildings forms around the plaza in front of the station. Even so, many of the lots remain empty, and only the shapes of the blocks have been set in advance. The residential area in the upper left of the frame spreads further south, and a large reddish-brown excavation opens in the middle of the left side. Two blue water surfaces appear at the right edge, and wide woods remain in the right half of the frame.

The station was placed in 1984. A railway was laid among the fields on the plateau, and Chiba New Town Chuo Station was built partway along it. In 1996 the town became a city with the founding of the City of Inzai, and this area came within its boundaries. In 2010 a line heading to Narita Airport was added, and it became a station served by two lines. The volume of people carried thus grew after the last era of the aerial photographs.

In today's photograph, the area around the station is the place with the densest buildings in the frame. The band of the railway has grown wider into many parallel lines, and on its north side large single-roofed buildings and wide paved areas gather. A wide straight road extends north from the station, with buildings lining both sides. Alongside the railway, another wide band passes through to the east, with curved ramps branching off. Placing the two photographs side by side, you can read that the band that stood isolated in the bare ground in 1984-86 has become the axis that gathers the town. From the upper left to the middle of the frame, residential areas continue without a break, and dense woods remain in the valley north of them. In the lower right of the frame, the long, narrow water surface and the band of woods on its shore remain in the same shape, and the water surface in the valley was left. Fields and woods are still wide in the right half, showing where on the plateau the town stopped.

At a residential site in Kogari 5-chome 1.6 km away, land values from 1999 remain. Up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji), the 145,000 yen per square meter of that year, 1999, is the highest value at this reference point, and 2021, at 66,100 yen, is the lowest year. In the 2026 official land prices it is 91,700 yen, so the value fell and then came back, recovering to 1.39 times its 2021 level. However, the reference point is 1.6 km away, so it does not directly represent the value next to the station.

The elevation of the center of the location is 16.8 m, and the difference from the four directions is 5.9 m at the smallest, to the north, and 8.1 m at the largest, to the west. It falls in a valley hollow cutting the plateau, where surfaces leveled by development and the original valley surfaces are mixed. The places where the water collects in rain follow the original terrain. The expected areas of flooding and the landslide warning zones are shown on the City of Inzai's hazard map.