A Restatement of the Dispersed City Hypothesis

A recent paper by Stafford' called atten_ₜion to conflicting uses of term city. Philbrick has used it more or less synonymously with phrase sprawl. 2 As Beimfohr3 used term with respect to southern Illinois (Fig. 1), however, and as subsequently developed, 4 it refers to a group of politically discrete cities which, although separated by tracts of agricultural land, function together economically as a single urban unit. Stafford concludes that latter sense is to be preferred because the concept was first introduced into literature in this sense, and because terminology such as urban sprawl has already been accepted which expresses Philbrick's idea of a dispersed city. 5 Stafford chose not to weigh evidence supporting existence of these dispersed cities. Since Philbrick's concept is primarily descriptive of pattern of land uses, 6 and his study is based on direct field observation, there can be no doubt of existence of dispersed city in sense of urban sprawl. On other hand, existence of dispersed city in sense of a number of functionally interdependent centers is not firmly established. Glennon has concluded that neither degree of retail inter-action, nor uniqueness of retail trade patterns, is sufficient to warrant the treatment of thirteen politically discrete cities of southern Illinois as