The Location of Service and Office Activities in Nashville-Davidson County, 1970

Abstract

centric city is based upon a descriptive picture of urban residential patterns put forth by E. W. Burgess some fifty years ago [Burgess 1925]. This model locates all service and office activities in the central business district (CBD), and then arranges other land use in concentric bands focused on the downtown core. One profitable extension of this model by Alonso and others has been to explain the abstract monocentric city in terms of access, amenity, and public policy factors set forth by Foley [Alonso 1964; Foley 1956]. This approach also locates the service and office firms in the downtown core because these activities are most dependent on accessibility to both input and output markets. Other descriptive studies of intraurban land use emphasize that service and office site selection is made on the basis of need for access and amenity resources available at a particular location [Loewenstein 1965; Murphy 1966; Rannells 1956]. Recent studies have been concerned with the characteristics and determinants of service and office location in New York [Armstrong and Pushkarev 1972], London [Rhodes and Kan 1971], and Chicago [Fales and Moses 1972]. The New York studies have tried to identify the intraurban distribution of services that occupy that city's office buildings and to investigate New York's status as the office capital of the nation. Interest in London's office activities also derives