ABSTRACT
Central place theory seeks to explain the relative location on the earth’s surface of human settlements of differing size and complexity. In the classic formulation of the theory in the 1930s, geographer Walter Christaller predicted that, given a flat, featureless plain of uniform population density, settlements would array themselves in a hexagonal pattern implied by mathematical packing theory and that the location of various retail activities within this honeycomb would be determined by a hierarchical ordering of settlements. Demand for certain goods and services (e.g., groceries) would ensure that vendors of such items would locate in every settlement, while higher order goods and services (e.g., banking) would appear only in higher levels of central places that were spaced farther apart. Every lower-level center would be equidistant from two higher-level centers that would compete with each other to service the needs of smaller towns. The ratios between the numbers of towns at successive levels would be determined by whether the system optimized marketing efficiency, traffic efficiency, or administrative efficiency. Christaller conducted a study of the towns of southern Germany in the 1930s and, using somewhat crude measures of centrality, found patterns consistent with his theory in a system dominated by the “marketing principle.” (A more rigorous but less influential contribution by August Lösch does not make Christaller’s assumption of uniform population density.)
All real-world urban systems differ from the pattern predicted by Christaller, often for reasons other than violations of his assumptions (e.g., by rugged topography). These divergences from the theory can be of great interest to social historians, though the most ambitious application of the theory so far to a society in the past, late imperial China, is by anthropologist G.William Skinner (1965). Introducing a temporal dimension into the model, Skinner suggests, for example, that modernizing forces can affect the ratios between the number of centers at different levels, and thus seriously impact the boundaries of community in peasant society.
