IV.

Modification by Lösch

In reality, market areas are very rarely neat and hexagonal. Physical features like valleys and mountains affect settlement patterns and market areas, as do factors that improve communications in one direction but not in another, such as motorways. Lösch sought to represent reality more accurately. He considered it unlikely that settlements would be distributed more or less concentrically around places of the next higher order. Instead, the highest-order settlements, such as large cities, would restrict the nearby development of high- and middle-order settlements because the cities would provide all their functions, and more. In a Löschian landscape, such as that illustrated in the right-hand side of the diagram, small, low-order central places are found close to very large settlements, such as metropolitan centres, whereas high- and middle-order settlements will only be found a substantial distance away. Even then they are more likely to be clustered in certain directions rather than distributed evenly around the metropolitan centre.