Models of Intra Urban Consumer Behavior and Their Implications for Central Place Theory

In geography as in other social sciences there has been an unwillingness to show the relevance of empirical findings to established theory.1 This is true of empirical studies of central place systems even though many such studies profess an interest in central place theory. The list of works that attempt to confirm aspects of central place theory is now so long that the profession might expect some rather definitive conclusions to exist concerning the role and the relevance of this theory in the explanation of the locations of cities [4]. We maintain that few such conclusions exist and that those attempts to find properties of central place systems in the real world, as they were described in the classical statements of Losch and Christaller, have not contributed to a scientific evaluation of the role and efficiency of the theory. There are two sets of behavioral postulates in central place theory and, while both have been frequently discussed in the literature, the consequences that would follow if these postulates were different from those assumed by the theorists have been almost totally neglected. One postulate describes the behavior of entrepreneurs. The Losch formulation states that whenever purchasing power equal to or greater than a given threshold for a good exists, an entrepreneur will commence offering the