Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9.21
Christaller's Hierarchy of Settlements and
Their Service Areas.
Christaller's interlock-
ing model of a hierarchy of settlements and their
service areas include: C
city, T
town, V
village, H
hamlet.
places. The smaller places would then provide fewer cen-
tral functions to a smaller-yet service area.
To determine the locations of each central place,
Christaller needed to defi ne the goods and services pro-
vided. He studied the sale of goods and services and calcu-
lated the distance people would willingly travel to acquire
them. Cities, he postulated, would be regularly spaced,
with central places where the same product was sold at the
same price located a standard distance apart. He reasoned
that a person would not be expected to travel 11 miles
to one place to buy an item if it were possible to go only
9 miles to purchase it at another place. Central place
theory maintains that each central place has a surround-
ing complementary region, an exclusive trade area within
which the town has a monopoly on the sale of certain
goods, because it alone can provide such goods at a given
price and within a certain range of travel.
China Plain and the Sichuan Basin display the seemingly
uninterrupted fl atness assumed by Christaller's model.
When G. William Skinner examined the distribution
of villages, towns, and cities there in 1964, he found a
spatial pattern closely resembling the one predicted by
Christaller's model. Studies in the U.S. Midwest sug-
gested that while the square layout of the township-and-
range system imposed a different kind of regularity on the
landscape, the economic forces at work there tended to
confi rm Christaller's theory.
Christaller recognized that not all his assumptions
would be met in reality; physical barriers, uneven resource
distributions, and other factors all modify Christaller's
hexagons. Nonetheless, his model yielded a number of
practical insights. His studies pointed to a hierarchy of
urban places that are spatially balanced and also estab-
lished that larger cities would be spaced farther from
each other than smaller towns or villages. Although
Christaller's model of perfectly fi t hexagons is not often
realized, his studies confi rm that the distribution of cities,
towns, and villages in a region is not an accident but is tied
to trade areas, population size, and distance.
Hexagonal Hinterlands
Based on this description of Christaller's theory, you may
expect the shape of each central place's trade area to be
circular (bullseye shapes surrounding each place). But cir-
cles either have to overlap or leave certain areas unserved.
Hence, Christaller chose perfectly fi tted hexagonal
regions as the shape of each trade area (Fig. 9.21).
Urban geographers were divided on the relevance
of his model. Some saw hexagonal systems everywhere;
others saw none at all. Christaller received support from
geographers, who applied his ideas to regions in Europe,
North America, and elsewhere. In China, both the North
Central Places Today
When Christaller worked on his spatial model and pro-
jected central place theory to help explain the distribu-
tion of urban areas, the world was a simpler and much less
populated place than it is today. As many urban geogra-
phers have pointed out during the debate that followed
Christaller's publications, new factors, forces, and conditions
