Metropolitan structure and hierarchy of center cities and suburban cities

To describe the distributions of economic activities and population among constituent communities within the contemporary metropolitan area, scholars have been interested in the structure of the metropolitan system, and they developed several models of metropolitan form based on the typology of center city and suburban city. With the postwar deconcentration and suburbanization, the traditional monocentered model which described a metropolitan area as having a single dominant city and some number of subdominant suburban cities was found inadequate for analysis of current metropolitan areas. Recently, reformulated models suggest a multinodal, multicentered, or noncentered form.; A recent study describes the structure of the metropolitan system in a somewhat different way in the sense that it did not depend on a center city and suburban city dichotomy. This study showed the existence of hierarchical differentiation of dominance along a continuum among cities in many of the current metropolitan areas.; The research objective is to update earlier findings and to examine whether the same factors determine the level of dominance of center cities and suburban cities and whether effects are similar with respect to direction and magnitude. I used commuting flow patterns from 1990 Census data to measure relative central position of a city in the hierarchical system and 1990 Census definition of a center city. The results of this study demonstrate that center cities and suburban cities do still have somewhat different characteristics and those characteristics influence centrality of center cities and suburban cities in a different way although there certainly exists hierarchical differentiation of dominance along a continuum among places in the current metropolitan areas. Variables included in this research largely explain the difference in centrality score between center and suburban cities.