A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1988

A commercial center network is a major system of a city and its basic function is to take care of certain services for settlements within the operational radius of the city. As important as the city road system, building up a sound city commercial center system is advantageous to the improvement of the people's living conditions and favourable to the city's future development. Recently in most Chinese cities, the problems of city centers have become more and more serious which has made many local governments and planners urgently launch urban center renewal plans which, however, are often unsatisfactory as they generally lack a wider perspective. With the same purposes as the urban center renewal plans, this study aims at finding out the real relation between the people's shopping behaviour and the existing commercial center system. The results show that the rapid growth of the city primary center largely creates severe pressure on the city centers. Therefore, controlling the rapid expansion of the city center should be combined with commercial decentralization as an efficient and possible way for future commercial development. To achieve the overall the objective, firstly, a comparative study is conducted to explore the specific attractiveness of the city primary center and a secondary center. Secondly, with the help of the micro computer, a synthetical commercial center index was derived from a principal component analysis of the six real indexes the twenty-nine commercial centers. Finally, a quantitativ accessibility approach the people's visits to shopping center. This is then expanded to simulate various options for future commercial center development. Based on the analysis, suggestion for a polycentric commercial pattern are made.