Central place hierarchies have been the traditional basis for understanding external
urban relations. However, in contemporary studies of these relations, a new emphasis
on urban networks has emerged. Rather than either abandoning or extending central
place thinking, it is here treated as representing one of two generic processes of external
urban relations. Town-ness is the making of ‘local’ urban–hinterland relations and
‘city-ness’ is the making of ‘non-local’ interurban relations. Central place theory
describes the former through an interlocking hierarchical model; this paper proposes
a central flow theory to describe the latter through an interlocking network model.
The key difference is the level of complexity in the two processes.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Geography and Environment
Citation
TAYLOR, P.J., HOYLER, M. and VERBRUGGEN, R., 2010. External urban relational process: introducing Central Flow Theory to complement Central Place Theory. Urban Studies, 47(13), pp. 2803-2818.