Park-PFI in 2025: Reviewing the Year's Awards and Regional Application Patterns

Park-PFI (Public Solicitation Management System) was established by the 2017 amendment to the Urban Park Act. The statutory basis is Article 5-2, which defines the framework for the park manager to select a designated installer through public solicitation. The system rests on three elements.

First, the public solicitation guidelines. The park manager publishes these guidelines prior to solicitation. They define the scope of the target park, the types of facilities eligible for solicitation, the maximum installation/management permit period, the building coverage ratio cap, and the policy for returning revenue. Second, the certified plan. Applicants prepare this plan in accordance with the solicitation guidelines, and the park manager certifies it after selection. Third, the special installation/management permit. The permit issued under a certified plan can run up to 20 years (extended from the usual 10-year ceiling), and the building coverage ratio can be raised by up to 10 percentage points above the base 2%.

In short, Park-PFI is a system for selecting through public solicitation a private operator to install and run revenue-generating facilities, and for granting that operator a long-term permit. Compared with the Designated Manager System, which entrusts overall park management to a private entity, Park-PFI focuses specifically on the installation and operation of revenue facilities.

→ For the basic structure and comparison with the Designated Manager System, see What Is Park-PFI?.

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National Statistics in Motion

As of March 31, 2025, 182 parks nationwide were actively using Park-PFI and 165 were under consideration. A year earlier (March 2024), 165 parks were in active use and 136 under consideration. Active use grew roughly 10% in a single year and the consideration pipeline expanded by about 21%. Both stages grew at once; the larger expansion on the consideration side indicates that the inflow of newly considered projects has not slowed.

Implementing municipalities are estimated at over 110. By municipal scale, designated cities and core cities account for roughly half, municipalities under 50,000 people for about 20%, and the remaining roughly 30% are mid-sized cities between 50,000 and 500,000.

Projects That Moved in 2025

The main movements visible in 2025 from PPnet and other public sources are summarized below.

Projects under solicitation (installation and management type):

Public-private collaboration feasibility studies and sounding:

New cases opened or selected in 2024–2025:

• Naha City — Manko Park
• Toyama Prefecture — Joganji River Park "BBQ TERRACE"
• Beppu City — Shoningahama Park "SHONIN PARK"
• Tsushima City — Tennogawa Park
• Yamagata City — Ekimae Park "Kasumi Terrace"

Two things stand out in the geographic distribution. First, large-scale package projects are forming around designated and core cities. Osaka Prefecture's Minoh and five additional parks operate at the prefectural scale, and Kawasaki City's Tamagawa Mihari Park is designed as an integrated project with the riverine green space. Second, regional hubs are moving — Saga, Tokushima, Otsu, Okinawa, and Okayama, all in the 300,000 to 700,000 population range, line up across the list.

Business-type composition has shifted from the early "stand-alone café" pattern to composite formats (BBQ, camping, dining, and retail combined). Glamping has settled in as a workhorse format for regional cities, and sports-focused entries (fitness, outdoor exercise facilities) are increasing among new participants.

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The Six Established Typologies

A previous article analyzing successful cases in municipalities under 100,000 people organizes Park-PFI success patterns into six typologies (see Park-PFI Strategy for Smaller Municipalities).

1. Regional resource type — Combined with hot springs or historical assets (Kadaru Terrace Kindaichi in Ninohe, among others)
2. Problem-solving type — Addressing underuse and aging of existing parks by introducing childcare or welfare functions
3. Glamping type — Lodging and camping formats coupled with tourism demand
4. Vertical type — Vertical use of narrow sites enabled by the building coverage exception (Harukigawa Park in Beppu)
5. Package type — Bundling multiple parks to secure project scale (Takakura Park and five others in Hachioji)
6. Townscape company type — A locally funded SPC leading as the lead applicant

These six typologies cover the range of cases observed between 2017 and 2023. Looking at 2024–2025 movements, however, several patterns appear that the six typologies do not fully capture.

New Patterns Visible in 2024–2025

Pattern A: Broad-Area Packaged Management

A single operator providing broad-area packaged management across multiple parks at the prefectural scale. Osaka Prefecture's Minoh and five additional parks, with operations set to begin in April 2027, illustrates the prefecture-scale package model. This extends the existing "package type" from the municipal to the prefectural scale and can be read as a complementary design for situations where smaller municipalities cannot sustain a project alone.

Pattern B: National Government Park Application

The "specified operation business" advancing at Sanuki Mannou National Government Park is not a Park-PFI under Article 5-2 of the Urban Park Act in the strict sense, but a new route that brings a Park-PFI-equivalent design into the national park system. For smaller cities that host a national government park, this opens a new commercialization route.

Pattern C: Park Renovation Agreement Combination

A movement to combine Park-PFI with the new Urban Park Renovation Agreement system. Possible variants include integrated operation alongside townscape development and pairing with the introduction of renewable energy installations. The agreement system sits outside Park-PFI as a separate scheme, but combined use is likely to grow in practice.

Patterns A through C do not displace the six typologies; they add options that enable broader-area and more composite projects.

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Three concrete cases give the patterns texture. Each is a previously documented case, but reading them in light of 2025 developments brings the open questions into sharper focus.

Case 1: Kadaru Terrace Kindaichi (Ninohe City, Iwate Prefecture; population approximately 23,000)

A locally funded townscape company, Kadaru Mirai, established an SPC and developed hot spring, sauna, lodging, restaurant, and indoor pool facilities at a nearby park of approximately 2 hectares. The case is documented in detail on PPnet and received the Excellence Award at the 2023 Japan Society of Civil Engineers Design Awards.

Three points are worth noting. First, the case showed that even at the 23,000-population scale, a project can stand up when a regional resource (Kindaichi Onsen) sits at the core. Second, the third-sector townscape company carried the SPC, structuring a local operator as the lead applicant. Third, by aligning Park-PFI with the replacement of the aging municipal bath facility, the city ran Park-PFI not as a single-facility project but within a broader framework of public asset restructuring.

Case 2: Harukigawa Park (Beppu City, Oita Prefecture; population approximately 110,000)

A case using the multilevel urban park system on a narrow site — the West area at approximately 0.92 hectares within a total park area of about 1.17 hectares. In the West area, a supermarket and tenant on the ground floor and an artificial turf field, café, and management office on the second floor stack vertically. The case is introduced as the first Park-PFI multilevel urban park in western Japan. Annual usage fees to the city are projected at approximately ¥14 million.

The point is that the case effectively cleared the conventional rule of thumb of "a park of 3 hectares or more" through vertical use. Combining the building coverage exception (up to 10 percentage points) with the multilevel urban park system brings small parks in built-up districts within reach of Park-PFI. The case is a useful reference for regional cities sitting on underused small parks in commercial and residential areas.

Case 3: Takakura Park and Five Others (Hachioji City, Tokyo; population approximately 580,000)

Five neighborhood parks of 0.25 hectares each were bundled into a single contract awarded to one operator. By packaging parks that would not have stood up individually, the city secured the project scale needed for a private operator to participate as the lead applicant. The business type adopted is the development and operation of ball-play areas.

The significance is that the case demonstrates how scattered small parks in residential districts can be reorganized as a unit of public facility management. Positioned as a municipal-scale variant of broad-area packaged management (Pattern A), it offers a model for bundling multiple neighborhood parks in regional cities.

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When regional cities consider public asset utilization, the use-case separation between Park-PFI and Small Concession becomes unavoidable. The two systems differ in eligible assets, contract form, and revenue-return mechanics. The May 2025 guideline revision explicitly opened a connection between them.

Shared VFM-Exempt Status

VFM (Value for Money) is a cost-effectiveness indicator whose calculation is mandatory under conventional PFI under the PFI Act. Park-PFI and Small Concession, in contrast, derive from their own statutes (the Urban Park Act and the laws governing public facility operating rights), and they fall outside the PFI Act's mandatory VFM calculation. This is common to both systems.

Not requiring VFM calculation substantially lightens the burden of council deliberations and internal procedures. PFI Act projects routinely produce repeated council debate over the precision of the VFM calculation, which Park-PFI and Small Concession avoid. The two schemes can be understood as operating outside the typical bottleneck of "we cannot proceed because we cannot produce a VFM figure."

Minimum Administrative Burden as a Shared Design

Park-PFI standardizes a design in which the private side bears the cost of revenue facilities and the public side bears part of the cost of specified park facilities (up to one-half of the portion contributing to enhanced park functions). Small Concession can push the minimum-administrative-burden design further — the Fukuchiyama type, with zero administrative burden and zero operating-right consideration, is a representative example.

For regional cities aiming to hold down administrative burden, a workable sequence is to first examine Small Concession feasibility and then select Park-PFI when the target asset is an urban park. The primary criterion is whether the target asset is an urban park, with secondary considerations being the need to combine revenue facilities and the need for a long-term installation/management permit.

→ For a fuller comparison, see What Is Small Concession? Mechanism and Cases.

Integrated Use of Parks and Adjacent Facilities

What the May 2025 guideline revision made explicit is a design that uses Small Concession for adjacent public assets (such as a closed school or former community hall) while developing the park portion under Park-PFI as an integrated project. Rather than running the two schemes in parallel, an integrated solicitation can serve as a vehicle for restructuring public assets across an entire district.

Specific combinations to expect:

• Integrating a former community hall (Small Concession) with an adjacent park (Park-PFI)
• A coordinated solicitation pairing a closed school (Small Concession) with a new urban park on its schoolyard site (Park-PFI)
• Packaging a former bath facility on land adjacent to a park (Small Concession) with revenue facilities inside the park (Park-PFI)

For regional cities, these combinations shift the approach from "one public asset at a time" to "restructuring across a contiguous area."

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Tracking only awarded cases obscures the limits of the system. Failed solicitations and full-withdrawal cases that surfaced in 2023–2024 deserve structural treatment.

Notable Failed Solicitations

A Three-Axis Classification of Failed Solicitations

Read through a regional-city lens, three axes emerge.

Axis 1: Revenue model

The mismatch among surrounding population, tourism demand, and year-round operability. At large suburban parks, visit frequency tends to be heavily dependent on season and weather, making the financial sustainability of a permanent food and beverage outlet difficult to secure. A design that places permanent revenue facilities in a large suburban park in a regional city operates under stringent feasibility conditions.

Axis 2: Required service level

The gap between public-interest standards (the level of park function that must be assured) and the private-side revenue expectations (the scope an operator can responsibly propose). The Odaka Greenery Pool Site reached the point of applications being registered before all applicants ultimately withdrew, which points to a gap between required service levels and operator assumptions.

Axis 3: Procedure

Procedural shortcomings: insufficient sounding, point allocations in evaluation criteria poorly matched to project realities, and inadequate channels for local operator participation. This is the area most amenable to prevention through careful, two-stage sounding at both the project conception and the project formulation phases.

Open Questions on Regional Application Limits

Three questions can be inferred from observed cases.

First, the question of a population floor for financial sustainability. Ninohe at 23,000 is cited as the lower-end success threshold; below that scale, successful cases remain scarce.

Second, the weakening incentive for major operators to participate. Smaller-scale regional projects often do not meet the revenue expectations of major firms, which makes it critical to design evaluation criteria around "participation by local operators" and "inclusion of local businesses in joint ventures."

Third, the gap in solicitation outcomes between projects that have used the national feasibility-study support (half-funding through the Comprehensive Social Capital Improvement Grant) and those that have not. Projects that have used the support appear to fare somewhat better in avoiding failed solicitations.

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The 20-Year Exit Question

Park-PFI was established in 2017, and the earliest case — Komeda Coffee at Katsuyama Park in Kitakyushu, opened July 2018 — will reach the 20-year contract terminus in 2038. At the eight-year mark, no contract has yet reached its scheduled end.

The system's exit strategy remains untested. Open questions include re-solicitation versus withdrawal versus continuation, ownership of revenue facilities and restoration obligations, and handover protocols to successor operators. Municipalities now initiating Park-PFI projects are entering a period in which they must design not only the first 20 years but also the 20 that follow.

Packaging Public Asset Utilization

The conversation is shifting from "Park-PFI alone" toward packaging multiple public asset utilization schemes. In the context of the PPP/PFI Action Plan (which targets a project pipeline of ¥30 trillion and 575 new projects), Park-PFI is positioned as the workhorse for urban parks, but in practice it is increasingly combined with cross-domain PPP/PFI (143 cases as of March 2024) and broad-area PPP/PFI (27 cases at the same point).

For regional-city practitioners, the shift is from asking "what can Park-PFI alone do" to designing Park-PFI together with Small Concession, designated management, and the broader public facility management plan as a single coordinated framework.

Evaluation Criteria for Operating Partners

The structural breakdown of failed solicitations shows that the design of evaluation criteria for operating partners separates success from failure. How quantitatively to evaluate "participation by local operators," "assurance of resident utilization," "inclusion of local businesses in joint ventures," and "the probability of 20-year operational continuity" leaves substantial room for creative work at the municipal level.

→ For example designs of evaluation criteria, see Park-PFI Evaluation Criteria Design and Scoring.

Park-PFI in 2026: Nationwide Statistics, New Cases, and Policy Outlook

National Park-PFI statistics as of 2026, recent notable cases, and an overview of guideline revisions

Park-PFI Strategy for Smaller Municipalities

Six typologies and solicitation design for making Park-PFI work in municipalities under 100,000

Small Concession in 2026

VFM-exempt, minimum-administrative-burden public asset utilization, and the connection to Park-PFI

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References

Park-PFI Activation Status (2025)

Park-PFI Activation Guidelines (May 2025 revised edition) (2025)

On the Public Solicitation Management System (Park-PFI) (2020)

Latest Trends in PPP/PFI Promotion (2024)

Urban Park Act, Article 5-2 (2017)

PPnet (Park-PFI Support Network) — Solicitations (2025)

Odaka Greenery Pool Site Park-PFI Solicitation Failure Announcement (2023)

Research on Introducing Park-PFI to Small Parks in Commercial Districts (2024)