The Classification of Municipal and Cities

Critisms of concentric zoning, regarding accessibility to places other than the CBD, will apply.

Sector Theory

Suggests that growth along a particular axis of transport usually takes the form of similar types of land use.

Each sector is of relatively homogeneous land use and expands outwards in a particular direction from the CBD. Empirical evidence for the sector arrangement was provided by patterns of residential land use.

The sector theory explains the pattern of urban growth from the point of view of changes in residential land use.

Residential area exhibits a tendency to segregate according to income and social position. If price and rents are taken to indicate qualitative differences in housing, persons in the highest income groups lives in houses commanding the highest prices and rents. Low-income area is located on the opposite side of the CBD to high-grade housing, near to concentrations of manufacturing industry.

The principle growth of an urban area takes place by a new building at the periphery.

Multiple Nuclei Theory

Harris and Ullman argue that in many urban areas there may be more than one local point and that each of the discrete nuclei influences the location of certain land uses.

In some urban areas such nuclei may have existed from the very beginning as when subsidiary settlements are absorbed into an expanding urban area to form secondary nuclei around which land use is intensified.

In other cases the nuclei appear with the growth of the urban area.

E.g. the growth of urban population in one part reaches a level, which will support a suburban shopping center of manufacturing firms find an advantage from being located together in an industrial area as they grow in number.

The larger an urban area becomes the more numerous and specialized the nuclei. The CBD need to be in the center of a city but as a result of asymmetrical growth it could be towards one edge of the built-up-area.

This theory allows the development of the most irregular pattern of urban land use because development can proceed from more than one center. In underlining irregularity of urban land use patterns it can be suggested that a particular pattern would have to be drawn to fit each urban area.

Such a conclusion overlooks the fact that urban land uses would be distributed according to the principles stated.

Thus accessibility considerations, opportunities for specialization, the importance land uses operate to determine land uses within any urban area.