Central Place Theory

About seventy years have now passed since Walter Christaller established the foundations of Central Place Theory in his book entitled Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. The Central Place Theory has played an important role in the explanation of urban system. It attempts to explain the size, number, and spatial distribution of settlement in the belief that some ordering principles govern the distribution.

The Central Place Theory posits the following: (i) that the basic function of a city is to be a central place which provides goods and services for a surrounding tributary area; (ii) that the centrality of a city is a summary measure of the degree to which it is such a service center; (iii)that higher order places offer more goods, have more establishments and business types, larger populations, tributary areas and tributary populations, do greater volumes of business, and are more widely spaced than lower order places; (iv) that low order places provide only low order goods to low order tributary areas; (v) that central places fall into a hierarchy comprising discrete groups of centers; and (vi) that the hierarchy may be organized according to marketing, traffic, and separation principles (Berry and Pred, 1965: 3).

The central place is specialized in selling various goods and services. As such, the city, which serves as a central place, has a number of smaller towns at an equal distance away from it, and is located at the center of minimum aggregate travel of its tributary area.

The more central the place is, the higher is its “order”. High order centers (e.g., universities) provide highly specialized goods and services while low order ones (grocery stores) offer simple basic goods and services, which require frequent purchasing with little consumer travel.

High order centers perform all the functions of low order centers plus a group of central functions that differentiates them and sets them above the lower order. This implies that there are low order goods and services in high order centers but not high order goods and services in low order centers. A result is a “nesting” pattern of lower order trade areas within the trade area of higher order centers, plus a hierarchy of routes joining the centers.
Based on the Central Place Theory, the larger the settlements, the lesser their number; the bigger a settlement, the farther away a similar size settlement is; the larger the settlement, the higher the order of its services; and the range (or the maximum travel distance of a consumer) increases as the population increases.

The conurbation as shown in the figure is the largest settlement, so has the largest amount of services and therefore there are less of them. The towns, on the other hand, have much less services and there are more of them.

The Central Place Theory assumes that all areas have an isotropic surface, an evenly distributed population and resources, and similar purchasing power of consumers. It points out that to prevent spheres of influence to overlap or have gaps, the best shape is a hexagon. The breaking point is where the consumer is equidistant from two/more similar services.

References:

Barlowe, Raleigh. Land Resource Economics: The Political Economy of Rural and Urban Resource Use. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1958).

Berry, Brian and Allen Pred. Central Place Studies. (USA: Regional Science Research Institute, 1965).

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