ABSTRACT
Cities accommodate a plethora of activities that relate to the productive, distributive, reproductive and exchange operations of our social system. Such functions possess different requirements and preferences with respect to urban location and building type. With their different degrees of market power, locational competition between these functions tends to create an urban landscape in which different activities become inscribed in geographical space. Thus, urban areas comprise a complex arrangement of different types of functional space. These specialised functional areas (industrial, commercial and residential) are linked with one another through transport and communication infrastructures, facilitating the movement goods, information and people, permitting the daily assembly of the labour force at its place of employment and its return home to recuperate.
