Central Place Theory

From Geography

The 'Central Place Theory' is about centrality, and figures out what makes places central. It states that a central place, a centre, is a geographic location where services and goods are provided in a high level for a surrounding area, comparing to another area called periphery. Walter Christaller (1966) is the maker of this theory, but we need to know about the theory of Weber and von Thünen, to understand how the 'Central Place Theory' has begun.

There’s an ‘Industrial Location Choice’ made by Alfred Weber, in which an industry is located where the transportation costs of raw materials and final product is a minimum. There’s another theory about ‘Land Use Patterns’ made by von Thünen, which focuses on the agriculture, in which all farmers will produce a commodity at the highest rent to maximize their net returns. In both of this theories, there is kind of a centre, which makes the location or the patterns central.

So, the 'Central Place Theory' is coming from the 'Industrial Location Choice' and the 'Land Use Patterns'. As stated earlier, Walter Christaller (1966) thought of a central place as a geographic location where services and goods are provided for a surrounding area. His ‘Central Place Theory’ seeks to explain the number, size and location of human settlements in an certain system. Hereby, there’s the assumption that the concentration of large populations in cities is the result of the spatial organization of secondary and tertiary activities that can be conducted more profitably when clustered together rather than dispersed. There are a few concepts, which are important to describe the concept of centrality. The first one is ‘range’ of a good. This is the maximum distance a customer will travel to purchase that good alone. The second one is de ‘threshold’ for a good: minimum volume of business necessary for an establishment selling that good alone to be commercially viable.

This raises a general rule: the more facilities and activities in an area, the bigger the providing area (Openshaw & Veneris, 2003). The providing area is the maximum area to which people go to a particular service. So, centrality is about the number of activities in a certain place. Centrality is also about the number of connections in a certain area. The more and heavier the connections and the number of activities, the higher the level of centrality of a certain area or place is. This brings us to the fact that Christaller (1966) made a hierarchy in places and areas. So, centrality is the level in which a place is central in relation to their surrounding places, based on the number of activities and the number of connections. There is the green area which is the third-order or tertiary area, which have a low centrality with a few connections and a low activity per connection. Then there is the red area which is the second-order or secondary area, which is more central with more connections, but a low activity per connection. And then there is the blue area which is the first-order or primary area, which have a high centrality with more connections and a high activity per connection.

References

Christaller, W. (1933). Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Translated by Baskin, C. (1966) as Central Places in Southern Germany. Prentice Hall.

Openshaw, S., Veneris, Y. (2003) "Numerical experiments with central place theory and spatial interaction modelling" Environment and Planning A 35(8) 1389–1403

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• Page created by Marleen Revenberg on the 17th of October