Cities are places of incredible creativity, cultural creation, excitement, and innovation. Central Place Theory helps to explain why small urban places like villages lie close together, while larger cities lie far apart. Cities are arranged in hierarchies. The locations of these cities follow a regular pattern, a pattern disturbed by physical barriers, resource distributions, and other factors. But by and large, cities are arranged in space in hexagonal regions.
Cities show regularity in the arrangement of places within the city.
Cities are spatially organized to perform their functions. Three models of urban structure are illustrated and described in Chapter 11. Models of urban structure reveal how the forces that shape the internal layout of cities have changed, transforming the single center city of old into the now common multiple nuclei or poly-centric metropolis. Cities vary from region to region in the world. Chapter 11 provides details on the differences and similarities between and among cities in North America, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa.