Abstract
In this paper a general equilibrium model of an intraurban system is presented in which the services sector is explicitly introduced. By restricting the location of the services sector to the city center, three possible land-use patterns are derived from the model: centralized, decentralized, and integrated. By applying the new technique of catastrophe theory into this new urban economic framework, it is shown that the spatial structure which will dominate the intraurban space will depend on the values of two parameters, representing the income level and the unit cost of transporting the central services. When these parameters take certain critical values the urban system may undergo catastrophic structural transitions from equilibrium to disequilibrium or the reverse.
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