Senri New Town (Senri-Chuo) about 60 years ago and today

History of Senri New Town (Senri-Chuo)

The Senri Hills are gentle hills with an elevation of about 60-70 m lying east-west along the northern edge of the Osaka Plain. Water does not stay on top of the hills, and rain falls into many valleys and gathers there. For that reason the land use of the hills was divided into two layers from early times. The ridges and slopes were bamboo groves and fields, and the valley floors were long, narrow paddies relying on irrigation ponds and spring water. The bamboo was sent out to the town area of Osaka as bamboo material and bamboo shoots, and the paddies could be widened only as far as the width of the valley. Although it lies less than 15 km from the center of the City of Osaka, poor water supply kept it from becoming a solid paddy-field area, and a site gathered together with one whole hill as the unit could be secured; these led Osaka Prefecture, pressed by the postwar housing shortage, to choose these hills.

Paddies in the valleys and bamboo groves on the ridges

The photograph from around 1936-42 shows those two layers of land use just as they were. All over the frame, valleys divide like branches, and on their floors paddies continue in steps. The outlines of the paddies curve like bows along the contour lines, and each one is small in area. Dense woods and bamboo groves sit on the ridges, and fields that look white cling to their shoulders. The settlements cluster at the mouths of valleys and at the foot of slopes, and below the center of the frame a group of densely gathered roofs can be seen. No wide road crossing the hills can be found anywhere, and every road is only wide enough to link paddies and settlements.

Even in the 1945-50 photograph, this composition hardly moves. The traces of care in the valley paddies have grown somewhat denser, and there are places where the lots of the fields have been finely divided, but no sign of a town comes in. At a time when the center of Osaka was trying to rise from the burned ruins, these hills were still completely a village.

A plan that came down onto the hills

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that the plan came down onto the hills. Senri New Town, which Osaka Prefecture built on the Senri Hills, is known as the first large-scale new town in Japan, and in September 1962 residents began moving in at Satakedai. The area spans the City of Suita and the City of Toyonaka; it was built up from residential districts, each with an elementary school and a neighborhood center at its core, and a design that separated trunk roads from pedestrian paths was tried. The prototype that the new towns across the country later took as their model was set on these hills. The 1961-69 photograph captures it partway. On the right of the frame, blocks of residential buildings facing the same way have already appeared in good order, and the cut-away slopes shine white. In the left half and the center of the frame, on the other hand, there are still the valley paddies and bamboo groves. Within a single photograph you can read from which side the wave of land development came in.

The skeleton of the plan was a structure that stacked the centers in three tiers. Each residential district had a neighborhood center with an elementary school and shops for daily goods, district centers were set up to group several residential districts together, and the central district that serves as the entrance to the whole hill was at the top. Senri-Chuo is at that top. Inside the residential districts, pedestrian paths were laid so that they did not cross roads for cars, and the stated goal was that children could reach their elementary school without crossing a road. Rather than turning the slopes of the hills directly into residential land, the procedure of cutting the ridges, filling the valleys, making flat surfaces and then placing the residential buildings and streets on them was repeated over the whole area. If you advance through the eras of the photographs, you can follow year by year how far over the hills that procedure reached.

The Expo and the arrival of the railway

In 1970, the Japan World Exposition was held on the north side of the hills, and in the same year the Kita-Osaka Kyuko Railway reached Senri-Chuo Station. The branch line extended to carry visitors to the venue was removed after the closing, and its land has turned into an expressway. The tracks for the festival disappeared, and only the tracks for daily life remained. During the six months of the exposition the name of Senri spread across the country, and the reputation of the new town also neared its peak in this period. Senri-Chuo was placed at the key point where the band of the expressway crossing the hills east-west meets the trunk road running north-south.

In the 1974-78 photograph, that Senri-Chuo gains its outline as a hub district with the station at its core. The straight lines of the roads and the curves of the pedestrian paths threading through the inside of the residential districts appear as a double mesh. As you advance to 1979-83 and 1984-86, the street trees and garden trees grow thicker, and the dry outlines from just after land development soften into green. However, the buildings standing in front of the station in 1984-86 are still low, with short shadows. The value that expresses the busyness of the photograph as a number rose nearly threefold, from 17.2 in 1961-69 to 51.1 as of 2026. The size of the swing by which the hills were rebuilt into a high-density town area shows in this gap.

The elevation is 64-70.8 m. Because the station itself is underground, this value is the height of the ground surface. In 1990 the Osaka Monorail Line came in, adding an east-west link to the north-south axis of the railway. Being a pioneer also meant being a pioneer in aging. After the population passed its peak in the mid-1970s, the moving out of the children's generation and aging advanced, and from the 2000s rebuilding got fully under way in the early danchi (public housing complex). In the residential area that counted 60 years since the town opened, plazas and commercial facilities were also rebuilt along with the renewal of public rental housing, and tall buildings lined up in front of the station.

The official land price (Chika Koji) of residential land in Shinsenri-nishimachi 2-chome, about 740 m from the station, almost halved from 440,000 yen per square meter in 1995 to 232,000 yen in 2005, then turned upward and recovered to 353,000 yen in the 2026 official land prices. The bottom in 2005 falls in the period when the first residential buildings passed 40 years of age. The swing in the judgment the pioneer received is carved into the series just as it was.

A corner that was not leveled

Still, the works that rebuilt the hills did not level everything. Just south of the band of the expressway, an old block where narrow alleys bend remains, occupying the same position as a settlement shown in the photographs from before land development. Some of the irrigation ponds along the valleys also keep their water surface, surrounded by groves of trees. The slope of the hills and the positions of the ponds are proof that the shape of the hills lives on under the residential land. If you follow the pedestrian paths inside the residential districts, you can confirm on foot the feeling of a path that goes on without meeting a road.