Summary of Central Place Theory Reading

Dent and Heck

Central Place Theory (CPT)is a method to understanding the "role of a city as a service center." Walter Christaller created a theory relating the city to its hinterlands. He believed it was more than a result of physical characteristics--that it was more about the exchange of ideas and commodities and exchange of goods (I guess that makes him sort of Jacobs focussed, rather than Childes). To develop the theory, Christaller made two assumptions: all land is flat and equal in value and the actors are economically rational. What he concluded was that there was an actual system to size and spacing of places (a hierarchical model of hamlet, village, town, city and regional capital). He also made a geometrical model of hexagons demonstrating how far a market stretched before the need for a new market.
The rigidity of Christaller's model got him into trouble. Losche came along and saved the day. Losche allowed one central place to have all the central goods and services present in the economic system. He assumed that many markets operated simultaneously. He then tried to find the least number of centers necessary. He also incorporated transportation into his formula although it is vague how (pg 146).

There is a nice model on pg 147 of how they compare.

Preference Structure

The preference structure models have more to do with the psychology of the customer and consumer behavior. Different methods of analysis were used to determine trends and the trends were placed spatially. For instance it was concluded that both distance and town size are relevant stimuli for a consumer shopping behavior. People are willing to bypass a small town to go to a town with more options but is farther away. This obviously affects the regional development of areas as well and should be taken into account as transportation costs continue to decrease.

Christaller also gets into trouble without being able to adjust to a periodic market (an inconsistent market) and wholesaling. Basically--central place is really rigid making it more of a special case than the general growth pattern.

CPT is applicable to planning new settlements. "in the end, the utility of a theory is demonstrated not in its mathematical elegance of esoteric theorems, but in its relevance in resolving real world problems."

Terms:
threshold: amount of purchasing power required to support a person engaged in a tertiary business activity
range of a good: the market area for the good (the distance people travel to purchase a good)
low-order goods are goods that everyone needs and are sold rather cheaply and high order goods are goods like jewelery that involve larger expenditures per trip in both time and money.
centrality:
size and spacing: 5 tiered hierarchical system (hamlet, village, town, city, regional capital)
functional hierarchy