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Thünen model: they offered a deeply satisfying picture of how market forces trade off access for land,
of how space becomes structured into zones characterized by different activities, of the simultaneity, the
general equilibrium, that characterizes economics when there is competition for scarce resources.
Unfortunately, the new models also shared the basic vice of von Thünen: the (literally) central fact, the
existence of a central business district around which the city was organized, was left uncomfortably
unexplained. One could, of course, appeal to loosely specified agglomeration economies to complete
the model, but that was not a very satisfying closure. Worse yet, it became increasingly inadequate
because the real world decided to play a nasty trick on the modelers, by abolishing the monocentric city
as a reasonable approximation.
Anyone who has driven around an American metropolitan area knows what I am talking about. The
quintessential city of America in 1950 was Chicago, a city built on railroads and exemplifying the
centralization that rail transport fosters. Chicago in 1950 was clearly centered on the Loop, the famous,
densely packed office district that was the original home of the skyscraper. Even now it is, urban
geographers tell me, the most monocentric city remaining in the United States. But Chicago is no longer
the number-two city. Its place has been taken by Los Angeles, the city Gertrude Stein described as
having "no there there." LA is not, whatever Ms. Stein may have thought, an undifferentiated mass:
neighborhoods are sharply distinct in terms of character and land use. But there is no single center: a
dozen or more office districts compete with each other.
Those of us from the "real" cities of the East and Midwest used to scoff at Los Angeles. Nowadays,
however, the
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