ABSTRACT
Urban geographers, regional scientists, and city planners have long classified forms of metropolitan growth in an attempt both to understand the forces shaping it and the consequences of the evolving patterns. Following a brief review of theories and writings on suburban growth patterns and spatial forms of office growth, this chapter classifies SECs and assigns case sites to one of six groups based on a number of discriminating variables. It provides a foundation for sorting out transportation-land use relationships among the case sites studied. The three classic models of metropolitan structure are concentric zone, sector, and multiple nuclei. The migration of factories and retail outlets to the suburbs, ushered in, in part, by the dawning of superfreeways, gave rise to still other visions of metropolitan growth. Some authors characterized the evolving form of urban change as counterurbanization – the erosion of a single-centered metropolis.
