A Survey of Short-Term Changes in the Land Use Mix of Three American Central Business Districts

A SURVEY OF SHORT-TERM CHANGES IN THE LAND USE MIX OF THREE AMERICAN CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICTS David C. Weaver* In recent years a great deal of attention has been devoted to the changing character of the central core of the American city. Researchers have investigated trends in retail sales, the influx of office and financial uses, and the changing pattern of land values. They have also concentrated on associated problems of changing residential and shopping habits, decentralization of retail and commercial functions, improved communications and transport facilities, and the impact of all these on the previously developed constitution of the C.B.D. Geographers have contributed a significant share to the overall effort. (1 ) Despite this widespread awareness of the changing nature of activities and functions in the downtown area, remarkably little has been published concerning quantitative changes in land use in the central business district through time. The relative and sometimes absolute decline of retail sales in the C.B.D. has been a phenomenon commonly recorded in American metropolitan areas since 1945, but there appears to be little knowledge as to whether or not this decline has been paralleled by contraction of retail ground space in the C.B.D. (2) The extent to which the proportions of components of the total land use space of the C.B.D. have changed over the past two decades is basically an unknown entity. Perhaps the main reason for this deficiency is the nature of the available statistics, particularly the lack of suitable historical data on which to base assessments of long term land use changes. Comprehensive systematic land use surveys of the city are for the most part of recent origin in the United States, and while many U. S. cities have attempted to assess the character and growth trends of their business areas in the past two decades, such studies have frequently been carried out in isolation without coordinated employment of a nationally accepted land use classification. As a result, the land use figures produced in these studies are generally of only parochial application and cannot be utilized for the comparative analysis which would be necessary to substantiate regional or national trends. U. S. Federal Agencies have developed a Standard Land Use Code especially for computer use which has advantages over earlier classifications because of its standardization and detailed categorizations. (3 ) As it becomes widely adopted it will prove a valuable tool for establishing inter-city land use trends through time, but its undoubtedly great contributions will *Mr. Weaver is assistant professor of geography at West Georgia College, Carrollton. The paper was accepted for publication in December 1970. Vol. XI, No. 1, 197153 be available only in the future. The problems which are provided by poor land use statistics are compounded by widespread lack of uniform delimitation techniques applied to the C.B.D. boundary. Together these obstacles seem to have discouraged attempts at comparative analysis of land use changes in the central area of the American city. MURPHY-VANCE STUDIES. Despite contemporary data deficiencies however , not all existing studies are valueless for comparative work. One useful study concerned with the spatial organization and association of land uses in the city center appeared in a series of three articles during 1954 and 1955. The first of the articles employed an uncomplicated land use code to delimit the central business districts of nine cities surveyed during the period 1952-53. (4) The later papers presented a comparative analysis of the nine business districts culminating in a number of conclusions concerning the shape, structure, and future land use trends of the American C.B.D. (5) The effort was widely accepted as breaking new ground in the field of urban geography and provided, as the authors had hoped, the trigger or stepping stone for a number of studies of the spatial structure of urban land uses. Although these later studies have focused attention on the problems of C.B.D. delimitation and upon the spatial differentiation of the core area, they have been largely concerned with non-American central business districts. Most of them are isolated investigations of individual cities with vastly different histories and economic and demographic characteristics...