ABSTRACT
Theoretical assumptions about the location of service activities have to some degree been confirmed by the empirical evidence. But it is also apparent that both regional and intra-urban distributions of services, whether examined on an aggregated or a disaggregated basis, reveal substantial deviations from the distributions predicated by central place or information diffusion ideas. Agglomeration, localization, or urbanization economies exert some influence on the location of different kinds of service; the result is spatial imbalance in their distribution. While the reason for this has in itself attracted considerable interest among geographers, it leaves room for many other questions about, for example, the optimum distribution of services by comparison with the patterns which currently exist, the most efficient pattern of service location (this need not be the same thing as the optimum), or the relationship between need and actual access to certain essential services.
