Function Follows Form

Ever since Victor Gruen opened Northland in a Detroit suburb, thousands of shopping centers and office parks have sprung up along city peripheries. While automobile travel is necessary for this transition from the monocentric to the polycentric city, car travel alone, so this paper argues, is not sufficient. Instead, the decentralization of shops and jobs (two important “urban functions”) hinges on the initial spatial distribution of the urban electorate, as embodied by the original city’s shape (“urban form”). The electorate is more likely to tilt in favor of decentralization the less skewed is original city shape. Hence “function follows form”. Given that “form follows function” eventually, too, cities either remain centralized and skewed in the long run, or shed all three: central jobs, central shops, and skew. We turn to a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas to illustrate these ideas.