Internal Structure of the CBD

Abstract

I T is a matter of common observation that the Central Business District (CBD) of the American Citv is not a uniform area. Everyone knows that the tallest buildings and the greatest crowding of pedestrians occur somewhere near the center, and that there is a less intensely used belt grading away from the central area. Most people are aware, too, of a rough sorting into districts in the CBDs of larger cities a group of department stores here, a cluster of theaters there, and a number of banks in still a third area. Such elements of the District's pattern and others that will be mentioned later constitute what is here called the structure of the CBD, the subject of this article. It is not our purpose here to examine the structure of individual CBDs, however interesting such a subject might be. To a certain extent, some of these possibilities were brought out in the two earlier papers where the nine CBDs -Worcester, Massachusetts; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Salt Lake City Utah; Tacoma, Washington; Sacramento, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mobile, Alabama; and Roanoke, Virginia-were delimited and compared.' It is our intention in this paper to consider the internal arrangement of features common to all CBDs, insofar as this can be done from a study of only nine cities of a limited size range. In short, we are attempting to present a tentative structure of the CBD. Actually, the difficulties inherent in analyzing and explaining the internal structure of a typical CBD are enormous, and the results presented here are considered by the authors as little more than a beginning. But an understanding of the structure of the District is so important that a start must be made. Indeed, it is through progress in this direction that the answers to many practical problems facing cities may come.