A RESTATEMENT OF THE DISPERSED CITY HYPOTHESIS.

The interdependence of the urban places in a dispersed city is reflected most strongly in their retail trade patterns. One place may have a large furniture store patronized by customers from the whole of the dispersed city; another center may have a large clothing store, yet another excels in footwear or radio and television sales and service or automobiles and so on. Functional specialization patterns may be reflected in retail sales returns, in traffic flow and in other readily available data. Certain types of specialization may be concealed in such statistics.