All Aboard Planning

Patterns of human settlement and urban form

Classic models of urban structure, bid-rent and central place theory, suburbanization, redlining and segregation, neighborhood change, and how cities are perceived.

Lesson 7 of 40 · about 30 minutes

Learning objectives

  • Compare the concentric zone, sector, and multiple nuclei models of urban structure.
  • Explain how land values sort uses by location (von Thünen, bid-rent) and how central place theory explains threshold, range, and hierarchy.
  • Describe how neighborhoods change through filtering, succession, and gentrification, and how households sort among local governments.
  • Describe the forces behind American suburbanization and the rise of edge cities.
  • Explain how redlining, restrictive covenants, and exclusionary practices produced segregated settlement patterns, and the legal turning points that followed.
  • Apply Kevin Lynch's five elements of the city image, and explain why natural, social, and economic systems must be analyzed together.

Key concepts

Classic models of urban structure

Early twentieth-century sociologists and economists tried to explain where different activities and people locate within a city. The models are simplified, but the exam expects you to recognize them.

Model Associated with Picture
Concentric zone (1925) Ernest Burgess (Chicago School, in The City, with Robert Park) Rings around the central business district: CBD, a "zone in transition," working-class housing, middle-class housing, and an outer commuter zone. Groups move outward as they prosper.
Sector (1939) Homer Hoyt (a study for the Federal Housing Administration) Wedges radiating from the center along transportation corridors. High-rent areas extend outward along particular sectors, such as a scenic lakefront or a main rail line, while industry and lower-rent housing follow other wedges.
Multiple nuclei (1945) Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman Several centers (a downtown, an industrial district, a university, an outlying business center), each drawing related uses around it.

The multiple nuclei model fits modern metropolitan regions best, with their many job and retail centers.

Three city diagrams with numbered keys. Concentric zones (Burgess): five rings, from the center out: 1 CBD, 2 zone in transition, 3 working-class homes, 4 middle-class homes, 5 commuter zone. Sectors (Hoyt): wedges around 1 the CBD, with 5 high-rent homes along one corridor, 4 middle-rent homes beside it, and 2 industry along a rail line flanked by 3 lower-rent homes. Multiple nuclei (Harris and Ullman): separate centers scattered through the city, 1 the CBD, 2 an industrial district, 3 a university, and 4 an outlying business center, with homes filling the rest.
Rings, wedges, and several centers: that visual difference is usually enough to answer the exam's "which model" question.

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