The structure and spacing of intra-urban retailing: Austin,Texas

Summary An incomplete hierarchy of shopping centers has been identified for Austin, With consideration of the CBD and planned ribbon developments, a complete hierarchy might well be postulated. The depleted population of lowest level centers has been noted and shown to be not incompatible with the other findings.However, some systematic elements have been deduced from the spacing of these centers. With a map transformation, a greater regularity may be found than had been detected here. But the actual distribution has been explained in terms of uneven densities of opportunities since the hierarchical requirement of central place theory had already been fulfilled. Topological variance in such a map transformation as has been suggested may considerably complicate a solution which could adequately account for the distribution of such transport oriented service centers as shopping centers. Further research on this data with such reordered space, using entropic analysis and evaluating the information contained in several distributions under different transformations might prove interesting. More complete data on shopping centers, particularly opening dates, and for defunct centers, store types and closing dates would aid the evaluation of the validity of the deductions made here.Donald Wade Jones is a Graduate Student, Department of Geography, University of Chicago and was previously a Graduate Student in the Department of Geography, University of Texas, at Austin. Kingsley E. Haynes, is an Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin.The authors would like to thank Dr. M. Woldenberg, Harvard University for his careful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Any errors, however, are the sole responsibility of the authors.