E > VERY nucleated settlement is the local center of a rural area which looks to it for some or all of the goods and services which alone are provided by central places. The boundaries of these areas may be determined with reasonable accuracy from interviews with business people and administrators in each town. An area so defined is strictly a trade region, a from which people come to transact business in a specific town. To such an area the name region has been customarily and usefully applied in New Zealand.' Because the larger centers offer the wider range of services they therefore serve the most extensive rural areas and encompass within their regional boundaries the trade areas of smaller towns. The tributary regions of these lesser centers in turn are made up of the trade areas of sub -urban settlements. The boundaries between the tributary regions of towns of equal rank in New Zealand are relatively well defined and only in a few cases, such as Wanganui and Palmerston North, is there an extensive overlap in the areas claimed by two centers (Figs. 1 and 2).2 It is