Most Japanese urban geographers concntratd their efforts mainly on the problems of the rural-urban fringe at first after Second World War and then turned to the CBD. As a result the zone between them has been left practically untouched, except for a few spontaneous, though excellent, studies by Kiuchi et al.. This symposium was planned to fill up a part of the blank by restricting its theme to a part of the zone, i.e., to the zone encircling the CBD. To approach the theme the internationally comparative point of view was requested to the participants. Main results obatined may be summarized as follows: In Japanese large cities the CBD is expanding not only vertically, but also horizontally. Changes caused by the expanding CBD do not occur in a uniform way in the adjoining zone. Such different ways of changes were reported in detail. Very interesting is the distribution of slums in a city. They have not come into being in the zone near the CBD but in peripheries of the built-up area. Their growth seem to have no direct relation with the expansion of the CBD. Furthermore, population migration is not very remarkable in this zone except for residential sections which developed mostly on uplands, but in peripheries of the built-up area, because dormitories and residences owned by companies, schools, national and local govermnts etc. dominate in most cases there. These phenomena show that processes which are going on in this zone are different from those in the United States. At the end of the symposium a generalized scheme of the urban structure was presented by Tanabe. This scheme would serve as a common base for further studies of the zone in future.