ABSTRACT
Employment opportunities influence population levels, mainly through migration and, therefore, impact on housing requirements. Planners have an interest in three broad aspects of economic activity: local economic prospects and the consequent scale and character of development; personal incomes and the effect on demand for services such as shopping; and requirements for land, buildings and infrastructure. Because local economic activity is so strongly dependent on spatial interaction, meaningful analysis requires a definition of study boundaries which specifically acknowledges the interconnectedness of various activities/communities and, for this reason, the level of analysis is usually the region or urban area. More recently, however, the concern has switched from the location of activities, which is taken as given, to the relationship between activities and their impact on urban areas and their hinterlands.
