vital natural resource, and so forth.
As the purposes for which cities are founded thrive, so then do the cities thrive and grow. When those purposes founder, however, some cities tend to wither. Not all cities, however, wither. Some adapt, and evolve into new types of cities; a process which continues to stiumlate growth. One of the ways in which cities stimulate growth is through infra structure development. The development of roads and sewerage systems may attract firms, households, and individuals to an area. The development of an educational system will attract households to an area, and, in turn, an educated work force will attract firms to that area.
Location theory, among other things, attempts to explain and predict the locational decisions of firms, and the spatial patterns of industry which are the products of the aggregate 2 3locational decisions (Paelink, & Nijkamp, 1985). The initial assumption upon which location theory was based was that entre preneurs attempted to maximize profits in the context of prices fixed by the market, where they possessed perfect information concerning the relative costs associated with all potential locations. Thus, early location theory explained all loca tional decisions in the context of differences between poten tial locations with respect to production and transportation costs.
In many models, an assumption was made that production costs were constant over all locations. The location decision problem, thus, was reduced to a minimization of transportation costs. Later models eliminated the assumption of constant pro duction costs, and introduced considerations of multiple mar kets and resource sources (Paelink, & Nijkamp, 1985).
Since the mid 1960s, the emphasis in the models has shifted toward the relationship between location and demand. Additionally, the concept of imperfect competition has been...