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In Australia most manufacturing firms are force to make at least two kinds of location decisions, one involving the merits of the six capital cities, and the other based on variables operating inside the metropolitan areas. This paper is concerned with the behavior of the individual manufacturing firm when making the letter decision; empirical data have been obtained from three case study areas in Sydney. There is purposeful economic behavior by firms in locating, the most important influences being closeness to product market and the cost of land. The spatial effect is an arrangement of manufacturers strongly oriented to the CBD and to centrally located transport terminals. In a theoretical context, the neglect of rent considerations is a serious weakness in traditional manufacturing locating theory. The growing ability of firms to substitute among production factors also has important locational effects.

One hundred fifty-four towns with at least one commercial service and twenty inhabitants each are dispersed irregularly through Gippsland, Australia. A general relationship of their services S to population P is log S = 0.699 log P—0.367. The spatial pattern of residuals from this relationship is apparently made up of purely local elements. The fitting of low-order, partial trend-surfaces to the residuals establishes the presence of a weak but significant regional trend in their distribution. There are only minor differences between the map of residuals from regression and that of the deviations from the regional trend of those residuals. The explanation of the spatial character of the residuals, therefore, can remain in this case primarily in terms of local factors. The regional trend nevertheless needs explanation in terms of regionally 0perative factors that have not yet been established but which would not be suggested by more conventional methods of mapping residuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]