Central place theory
Also called: Christaller's theory · Topic: Human Settlements and Urbanisation in India · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
Central place theory was put forward by Walter Christaller in 1933. It explains why towns have the numbers, sizes and spacing they do. A central place is a town that serves the area around it with goods and services. On a flat, even plain, towns form a hierarchy. There are a few big high-order centres offering rare services and many small low-order centres offering everyday ones. Each town serves a six-sided (hexagonal) market area. This rests on two ideas. Threshold is the smallest number of buyers needed to keep a good or service going. Range is the farthest distance people will travel to get it.
Example
In the Ganga plain of Uttar Pradesh, villages buy daily needs from nearby small market towns. For big hospitals and universities, people travel to a large city such as Lucknow.
Don't confuse with
- Rank-size rule (G.K. Zipf, 1949): this compares city populations by rank, not by service areas. The city ranked n has about 1/n of the largest city's population.