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CHARACTERISTICS OF RURAL SETTLEMENTS  Half of the world’s population lives in rural settlements Two types  Type 1: Clustered  Circular or linear  In Colonial America  Type 2: Dispersed  In the United States  In Great Britain  Enclosure movement

CHARACTERISTICS OF URBAN SETTLEMENTS  Large size  High density  Social diversity  High percentage of people in cities  Global cities or world cities are at the top of the urban settlement hierarchy.  Center of the flow of information and capital in the global economy. REMEMBER THIS TERM! Urbanization: An increase in the percentage of the number of people living in urban settlements.

Urban-Services Services generate more than 2/3 of GDP in developed countries, compared to ½ in developing countries.

Where Did Services Originate? RURAL SETTLEMENTSURBAN SETTLEMENTS  Services in early rural settlements=met public needs  Examples = burial of the dead, religious centers, manufacturing centers  Early public services probably followed religious activities  Early business services to distribute and store food  Services in early urban settlements=ancient cities  Earliest urban settlements - Athens, Rome  Services in medieval cities  Largest settlements were in Asia  European cities developed with feudalism

THREE TYPES OF SERVICES Service 1: Consumer Services  Principal purpose is to provide services to individual consumers who desire them and can afford to pay for them.  Constitutes nearly ½ of all jobs in the U.S. Subdivided into four main types:  Retail and Wholesale Services  Education Services  Health and Social Services  Leisure and Hospitality

THREE TYPES OF SERVICES Service 2: Business Services  Principal purpose is to facilitate other businesses.  Constitutes ¼ of all jobs in the U.S. Subdivided into three main types:  Professional Services  Financial Services  Transportation Services

THREE TYPES OF SERVICES Service 3: Public Services  Purpose is to provide security and protection for citizens and businesses.  Constitutes about 5% of all jobs in the U.S. Workers divided among various levels of government.  Federal Government: 1/6 of public sector employees  State Government: ¼ of public sector employees  Local Government: 3/5 of public sector employees

Changes in Services Rising and Falling Service Employment  Service sector has seen nearly all the growth in employment worldwide.  Service sector has been negatively impacted by the recession. Change in Number of Employees  Within business services, jobs expanded most rapidly in professional services- engineering, management, and law.  Within consumer services, fastest increase has been in provision of health care

CENTRAL PLACE THEORY

What location should you open a new shop?  To help with this question, let’s use the CENTRAL PLACE THEORY.  Geographer Walter Christaller proposed the concept of a central place in the 1930s.  What is the CENTRAL PLACE THEORY?  It helps explain why consumers services follow a regular pattern based on size of settlements, with larger settlements offering not only more consumer services but also more specialized ones.  Concluded two things:  –People gather together in cities to share goods and ideas  –Cities exist for purely economic reasons The model uses hexagons.

STEP 1: LOCATE THE CENTRAL PLACE  A central place is a market center for the exchange of goods and services by people attracted from the surrounding area.  Its is centrally located to maximize accessibility.  A market area, or hinterland, is the area surrounding a service from which customers are attracted.

STEP 2: IDENTIFY RANGE AND THESHOLD  The RANGE of a service is the maximum distance people are willing to travel to use it.  People travel short distances for everyday services. e.g. groceries and movie rentals  People travel greater distances for services offered exclusively in specific places. e.g. concerts and professional sporting events  The THRESHOLD of a service is the minimum number of people needed to support the service.  Service providers determine the suitability of a service center by overlaying the range of potential customers to its threshold.

STEP 3: ARE THE GOODS OR SERVICES HIGH- ORDER OR LOW-ORDER?  High-order goods: Specialized items such as automobiles, furniture, fine jewelry, and household appliances that are bought less often.  Many businesses selling these items cannot survive in areas where the population is small.  Locate in large cities that can serve a large population in the surrounding hinterland.  Low-order goods: Items that are replenished frequently such as food and other routine household items.  Groceries, newspapers, drugstores, fast food

STEP 4: HOW MUCH MONEY WILL I MAKE?  1. Compute the Range  Survey local residents about willingness to travel a specific amount of time to the potential site of a new store.  2. Compute the Threshold  Identify how many patrons are needed to meet expenses.  3. Draw the Market Area  Draw the range around potential location of new store, then identify whether or not the threshold is met within that radius.

RANK-SIZE VS. PRIMATE CITY

 Rank-size rule: The country’s nth- largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement.  Plotting populations on logarithmic paper produces a straight line.  EXAMPLE: US IF NOT A STRAIGHT LINE=PRIMATE CITY!  Primate city: A city more than twice the population of the second-ranking settlement.  EXAMPLE: MEXICO

Rank-Size Rule  Cities in a country are ranked according to their size in relation to the country’s largest city  –Rank 1 – Largest City  –Rank 2 – ½ the number of people as Rank 1 city  –Rank 3 – 1/3 the number of people as Rank 1 city  –Rank 4 – ¼ the number of people as Rank 1 city  –Rank 5 – 1/5 the number of people as Rank 1 city PROBLEMS:  In some countries the differences between a First Ranked and a Second Ranked city was much less than expected  –Ex. New York City is only 1.3times larger than Los Angeles  Some countries are dominated by Primate cities so the changes are larger than expected

What are the primary advantages and disadvantages of living in a primate city? ADVANTAGESDISADVANTAGES  Magnetic attraction for businesses, services and people (cumulative effect)  Can attract international trade and business  Centralize transportation and communication  Enhanced flow of ideas and information among larger populations  Ability to offer high-end goods due to increased threshold  Urban-rural inequalities  Imbalance in development  Concentration of Power  Has a parasitic effect, sucking wealth, natural and human resources into city.  Become centers for unemployment, crime, pollution

Gravity Model-predicts that the optimal location of a service is directly related to the number of people in the area and inversely related the distance people must travel to access it.