No description available.

Post-war metropolitan development in the United States has been mainly due to suburban growth which resulted in dispersal of population, retailing, manufacturing, wholesaling and services. What is known about service suburbanization is primarily derived from survey research on location choices done in localized cases. There has been no comprehensive work done using secondary data on revealed behavior. This dissertation attempts that comprehensive study. The research analyzes the dynamics of locational structure of services in U.S. metropolitan areas from 1969 to 1989. The descriptive analysis of changes in the location coefficients provides evidence to demonstrate a spatial shifting of consumer oriented services roughly opposite to that of business oriented services. The top ranked business centers tend to exhibit a tendency toward greater centralization. There is a countervailing tendency toward decentralization of business oriented services in small and relatively underdeveloped service areas. According to the regional analysis, there is no clear tendency of business oriented services for the d services, however, appears to be strong for the 1969-89 period, especially for the Manufacturingbelt and South. Models for decentralization of consumer oriented and business oriented services indicate that the spatial dynamics of business services are different from those of consumer services. Relocation costs appear to be greater for business services than for consumer services. By contrast, service demand and racial composition seem to have a greater influence on decentralization of consumer services than on business services. The relocation costs are also likely to encourage more centralization of consumer and business services over a longer time span. The locational effects of corporate demand and decentralization of manufacturing activity, on the contrary, appear to weaken over a longer time span.

The consumerism of Western culture has allowed the prevailing suburban development pattern of the latter half of the twentieth century to evolve from a pedestrian-friendly canvas for the American Dream into an iconographic realization of commuting motorists decentralized from social interaction. Symbolizing solitude and privatization. this sprawling environment has become an epidemic deteriorating the social network in the United States: a condition that requires a remedy.With the popularization of traditional neighborhood development. a large majority of newly constructed communities find themselves located away from the realities of the modern bait environment. Like a bomb shelter. occupants have been allowed the opportunity to escape to a time before sprawl. consequently ignoring the problem. In order to address this condition. these issues can no longer go unaddressed they must be healed. This study depicts suburbia as an evolving network requiring a reinsertion of a mixed-functionality into its failed developments in order to reengage the occupant and revive suburbia's communal identity: in turn allowing the resolution to evolve from a bomb shelter to a Band-Aid.With research methods including qualitative assessments of numerous case studies. writings and diagrammatic theories regarding the social realm. interviews. and the consideration of numerous texts regarding interdisciplinary concerns as well as popular culture and sociological understandings. the study defines suburbia as a poachable territory — a construct that harvests opportunities for the occupant to reengage their context. By reversing the evolution from pedestrian to motorist. these interventions allow communities to embezzle the environment in an effort to establish a collective identity and reintroduce a social ream. Furthermore. these theories are then inserted in a generalizable residential development in Carmel. Indiana named Village Park Estates. By analyzing the potential found in these developments this epidemic can begin to be diagnosed allowing the author to establish a solution grounded in the routine of the everyday. / Department of Architecture

Thesis. 1975. Ph.D. cn--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / Bibliography: leaves 481-505. / Ph.D.cn

Thesis advisor: John Raeburn Thesis advisor: Laura Rigal. Includes bibliographic references (p. 363-382).