METROPOLITAN STRUCTURE AND THE SUBURBAN HIERARCHY

Recent research has indicated that the traditional monocentered specif ication of metropolitan form no longer describes the distributions of population and economic activity in many metropolitan areas. Much of t he deviation is attributed to changes in the suburban ring. Using comm uting patterns as an indicator of intrametropolitan systems of cities, I evaluate alternative specifications of metropolitan form and examin e the network position of large suburban cities ir 41 multinodal metro politan areas. The results call into question both the monocentered sp ecification of intrametropolitan relationships and more recent multino dal reformulations, suggesting instead that the metropolitan community is best viewed as a complex system of differentially dominant places.