Land readjustment, practised since the Arable Land Readjustment Act of 1899 and applied to cities by the 1919 City Planning Law, received its own statute in 1954. Landowners in a defined area pool their holdings; boundaries are redrawn to insert roads, parks and utilities; each owner contributes a share of area and takes back a smaller but serviced, regularly shaped plot, while a portion of reserve land is sold to finance the works. The 1954 Act allowed local governments and public agencies to initiate projects without unanimous owner consent, and the 1968 City Planning Act made readjustment the standard way of urbanising land.
Roughly a third of Tokyo's built-up area, and a large share of Japanese urban land generally, was produced this way — infrastructure paid for out of the land-value increment it creates, with no public land purchase and no cash compensation. It is the principal alternative to the Anglo-American expropriate-and-service model, and Japan's most successful planning export, adapted in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and, through JICA, much of the Global South.
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