ABSTRACT
In effect, this arises out of the way in which space is treated: in traditional central place theory, space is handled continuously (though boundaries appear which subdivide market areas) while in the models described above, space is treated as a set of discrete zones. Since they focus on spatial interaction between zones and the location of activities, we will call the discrete zones models 'SlA models' for convenience. This makes it easy not to have to assume that the population in the area is uniformly distributed or that all jobs are at the centre of a city or whatever. These kinds of assumptions are forced on Christaller and others, as otherwise the mathematics becomes intractable in the continuous space representations 1 • But this is to anticipate the argument: first, we review the kinds of ideas which form the basis of traditional central place theory.
