This study looks at applying the principles of Walter Christaller’s Central Place theory within a contemporary urban area. The challenge of this is that urban areas are much more complex and less predictable than the rural patterns studied by Christaller. Factors such as numbers of retail jobs, numbers of stores, sales per square foot, access to highway interchanges, and more recently the internet, in the United States has vastly altered the principles on which the Central Place Theory is based. So if we look at the retail centers of a city, such as Cincinnati, Ohio, can we find patterns that would show that the Central Place Theory properly explains the current locations of those same centers?
Using a set number of centers in the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area, certain characteristics were used to determine which centers were important at which level of the local hierarchy. The center’s characteristics were then placed in an index where a multiple regression analysis was used to find their weights or their relative importance to each other. From here, the patterns that developed as a result were analyzed and a complete picture of the urban effectiveness of the Central Place Theory began to take shape. The results that were found showed that the Central Place Theory does apply, but not perfectly. This is due to many reasons, but primarily three: the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area is not a homogeneous theoretical region, so because of this there is not a homogenous distribution of centers; “Big Box” retail stores and locations similar to them drastically change the nature, scale and locality of centers; and unlike a theoretical landscape of Christaller, accessibility is not uniform and centrality is greatly affected by distance from and vicinity to interstate highways. Because of these reasons, as well as others, this study finds that the Central Place Theory is not entirely suited to explaining centrality patterns in urban areas.