Advanced Insights in Central Place Theory

Abstract

Theoretical models with the central place theory, emergence of the city, urban system, and rank-size rule are surveyed in a common framework. We also review some related econometric models and discuss their application, and also show some empirical evidences in a few regions or countries. The main focus is to selectively survey several ideas from location theory, regional science, and microfoundation of scale economics and production externality that directly address the following questions. First, we discuss the famous but problematic ‘central-place theory’ development to explain the pattern of city sizes and locations, where some empirical works are also studied. Second, we examine the crucial scale economics or external economics on the formation of a monocentric urban configuration and also review the econometric model. Third, we investigate the ad hoc but fruitful theoretical analysis on the emergence of an urban system and discuss a few related empirical works. Finally, we introduce the theoretical model of the ‘rank-size rule’, and employ this useful idea to examine the distribution of cities within a country in different periods with various empirical evidences.