The different parts of any urban environment will have different purposes and functions. In the small town you will likely have a town centre, there will likely be some smaller centres, or perhaps a local or neighbourhood centre. Retail parks, office parks or out of centre supermarkets may be of such scale that they effectively operate as competing centres in their own right. Then there will be some parts which are focused on housing and some on different types of industry or business.
These areas could broadly be considered zones where certain types of activity tend to take place. Within these we may find infrastructure such as stations, or particularly important locations such as the point where multiple important roads join and these could be called nodes. These different functions of different parts of urban places can be broadly mapped and understanding the relationship between them is vital.
In the half century or so after the last Great War the location of these zones and nodes and the relationships between them altered fundamentally. Many of the uses that once fell into the town centre zone have separated into a variety of different outlying centres.
On the left we can see the structure of the commercial centres in a typical 19th century town and on the right the structure that often exists now:
Where there is insufficient demand, the splitting of the uses in the town centre zones across a number of locations essentially weakens one or both of the locations where the demand is now spread. Take retail space, this is now spread across a network of outlying centres in the form of supermarkets and big box retail which compete with each other, the town centre and the online offer.
When the workspace was located around the town centre, often in a mixed use zone one step back from the high street, the people working there would access and use the shops, pubs and services in the town centre. Workers would probably walk between home, work and the shops or pubs.
As that same workspace was moved to industrial estates and office parks often on the outside of the town, that meant that most people had to drive there, probably from an out of centre home in he new suburbs. People’s daily patterns of movement therefore altered so that these-days they are rarely in the town centre undertaking a necessary activity, but instead have to make a deliberate decision to venture there. Consequently, there is less footfall for the uses there and less chance of them surviving.
Not bored yet? Time to move onto section 15.
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