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course, central places must also serve the markets they provide for themselves and for each other, which
already starts to sound a bit more like what I have already described. But can anything like the regular
spacing of centers imagined by Christaller and Lösch emerge from the cumulative processes of Pred?
The initially surprising answer is yes. I have carried out a number of simulation experiments with a
highly stylized economy in which locations are lined up symmetrically around a circle. For each
simulation I began with a random allocation of manufacturing across locations, then let the economy
evolve. For some parameter values, of course, all manufacturing ends up in a single location. When the
parameters are such that several manufacturing centers typically emerge, however, they are normally
roughly evenly spaced around the circle. That is, this linear economy spontaneously organizes itself into
a pattern of central places with roughly equal-sized market areas.
I have a pretty good idea of why this is true, but haven't got it fully worked out yet. Let's just say that
''successful" locations, those that end up with a lot of manufacturing, tend to cast an "agglomeration
shadow" over nearby locations, but that rival centers can thrive if they are far enough apart; the result is
thus a number of centers at a more or less characteristic distance. Some work in progress suggests to me
that the spacing will be more regular, the smoother the initial distribution of manufacturing, with an
almost perfectly smooth initial distribution producing a perfect central-place pattern in which the
distance between centers is determined by the parameters of the model.
All this is for a one-dimensional economy, but I am, as Michael Milken would say, highly confident
that the same model extended to two dimensions would produce a
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