A COMPARATIVE TYPOLOGY OF URBAN EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS AND THEIR GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFERENCES (Part I)

Today the phenomenon called conurbation is becoming dominant as a new phase of urbanization, especially, in the large metropolitan regions. Under such circumstances each city is losing its functional self-sufficiency and being incorpolated in a large urban complex as one part of the whole. In such a continuous urbanized area the city seems to have its own tendency of functional specialization under its constraints, while the entire region as a whole is losing its rather static one central nucleus structure. The main purpose of this study is, therefore, to analyse the functional differentiation taking place in the Kanto resion, that is, a Metropolis of Tokyo and 6 surrounding prefectures which consist of 118 cities (in 1969), focusing on their employment patterns and employing mainly the next two measurements, location quotient and index of surplus workers of cities which have been developed in the field of economic geography. This paper consists of two sections. This is the part I which mainly discusses the dominant specialized urban activities and their locational patterns in the region derived from a factor analysis of employment patterns.