Hokusetsu Sanda New Town (Flower Town) about 60 years ago and today

History of Hokusetsu Sanda New Town (Flower Town)

This is a town where only the roads were built first. Flower Town, opened in the midst of the hills of the City of Sanda, Hyogo Prefecture, shows in the 1974-78 aerial photograph only wide roads running over the earth, and almost none of the houses of the people who live there yet. The land is about 190 m high, on top of the hills of Hokusetsu. The name, taken from flowers, was given after the development and is not a place name that has long belonged to this land. The past aerial photographs that can be viewed at this location are from two eras, and both fall before and during the making of the town.

Hills of ponds and valleys

The 1961-69 aerial photograph is coarse-grained black and white, and forest fills most of the frame. The whole frame is the forest of the hills. Valleys branch like tree limbs between the dark masses, and along those valleys irrigation ponds large and small continue one after another. Only the valley floors between the ponds form bright bands, and those are the cultivated surfaces. People's homes keep to the top and bottom edges of the frame: along the north edge there are settlements and fields along a road, and in the upper right corner a river and flat land with orderly lots can be seen. Along the south edge too there is a road running east-west, with settlements and farmland spreading on both sides of it. Toward the lower right there is one large surface brighter than its surroundings, but you cannot tell what it is. Even if you look for straight lines drawn by human hands in this frame, all you find are narrow roads tracing the valley floors.

Toward the right of the frame, a single vertical seam runs through. The right side of the seam shows a shade darker, and you can tell it is the trace of a separate exposure pasted on.

Being on top of the hills does not mean the land is flat. The location's measuring point is 189.5 m, but the four points taken in the four directions are all higher than that, and the highest, to the south, reaches 205.9 m. The center is lower than its surroundings, and this also means that before the development it was the side where the valleys gathered. If you look at the area of that hollow in the 1961-69 frame, a bright band of valley floor does indeed run in, and toward the west there is a small water surface.

A crossroads of bare earth

If you switch to 1974-78, the same frame turns entirely the color of earth. The tops of the hills that were forest have been cut down, the valleys filled, and wide roads cross over the earth. In the middle of the frame two wide roads meet at an angle, and even the rounded connections at their corners are finished. The outlines of lots are also drawn along the edges of the roads. Yet there are almost no buildings on those lots. There is only one corner a little south of the center where small white boxes form a row; the rest is a continuous surface leveled flat.

In this era, look for the forest of the valleys left uncut, remaining thin and branching like tree limbs within the surface of earth. If you go back and forth with the 1961-69 frame, the branching of the remaining forest overlaps exactly with the shape of the original valleys. In the north of the frame a long, narrow bright water surface remains, and from the center to the south several greenish ponds remain. In the northeast there is a separate set of orderly grid lots, and along the east edge the surface of earth sits shoulder to shoulder with the old town area. The color of the frame changes clearly at that boundary, and you can roughly see how far the works area extended. Just inside the south edge, several buildings with large roofs stand together, and this group is in the same position in today's aerial photograph too. In the middle of the left edge, a bare surface of a different color from its surroundings spreads out.

A planned residential area of this size was placed on the hills of Sanda because land of a sizable extent could be obtained at a position from which people could commute to both Kobe and Osaka. This residential area, called Hokusetsu Sanda New Town, consists of three districts, and Flower Town was the first of them where people began to live. In the period when the town was growing, the population of the City of Sanda grew at one of the fastest rates in the country. The reason only roads and lots were built first in the aerial photograph is that the town was made in this order. Because the works leveled surfaces cut from the hills and surfaces filled in the valleys into one, lots also arose where cut surfaces and filled surfaces sit next to each other. The way rainwater flows over the ground often follows the shape of the original valleys, so the sure way to find out which a lot of interest falls on is to look it up by lot number on the City of Sanda's official hazard map.

A residential area holding its ponds

In today's aerial photograph the earth color of the development has disappeared, and the roofs of detached houses cover the hills along curving streets. A single thin straight line passes through the middle of the frame from west-northwest to east-southeast, and around where that line reaches the center, buildings with large roofs, a plaza and parking lots gather together. The station's name is Flower Town, the same as the town, and the line is called the Koen-Toshi Line. In the 1974-78 frame this line running through the center cannot be found anywhere. If you line up the two past eras and today, you can read the order: roads and lots first, people's homes next, and the tracks after that.

A little right of center stands a single building with a round roof. Wide earth-colored squares are placed in several spots within the town, with long, low buildings attached beside them, an arrangement that reads as sports grounds and school buildings. The irrigation ponds remained without being filled in. Some of the ponds that continued along the valleys in the 1961-69 frame hold water in the same places, surrounded by the residential area. Of the forest of the valleys, too, the parts left uncut remain in masses toward the lower left and in the middle of the frame. Along the left edge a road can be seen winding round many times to link the upper and lower levels, and in the southwest corner there is a mass of a separate residential area. If you go down to the bottom edge, the rows of roofs break off and the land returns to paddies, fields and settlements. You can see within a single frame where the edge of the town ends.

The sequence of values also reflects the time after the town was completed. At a measuring point on residential land in Hazamagaoka 3-chome, about 840 m from the location, 162,000 yen per square meter from 1995 to 1998, at the start of the records, is the highest value up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). The lowest up to the 2026 publication is 64,100 yen, the same amount in every year from 2022 to 2026. It has settled at a level of about 40% of the first year, and while this is not the value of the town itself, the waves that hit a residential area built all at once on top of the hills can be read from it.