Progress towards sustainable development and the urban-rural divide: an analysis of municipalities in Japan

Previous research on the urban-rural divide has been concentrated in areas such as politics, economics, information technology, and education, and there is little quantitative information on the relationship between the urban-rural divide and the realization of sustainable cities and communities. The objective of this study is to identify patterns in the progress of Japanese municipalities across the three pillars of sustainable development and to examine the relationship between those patterns and socio-urban conditions. Using agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis, seven clusters representing distinct patterns in the progress towards sustainability were identified. Two clusters were found to have comparatively high overall levels of achievement, but one cluster exhibited higher performance for the economic pillar, while the other had higher performance on the social and environmental pillars. One cluster with the least progress across all three pillars was also identified. Municipalities in the clusters with the highest achievement levels were the most populous and most densely inhabited, while municipalities belonging to the cluster with the lowest achievement levels were the least populated and least urbanized. However, multivariate analysis showed that the effect of population on the total sustainability progress was larger than the effect of urbanization.