The content and functions of possibilities of the concept linking to the geographical city center

Abstract

As the researches of the városszerkezet are operating with several concepts to represent the centers of the cities, it's worth comparing the different explanations. Many of the urban geographical terms such as „city” or „CBD” became a georaphical basic term that most of the authors do not explain in their studies, but by comparing the use of these terms, we can state that they are used with a whole different meaning even in the same study. The main goal of my study is to clarify the eight urban geo-raphical terms – used in Hungarian literature specifically – by their use until now and I also suggest a more unified usage for the future. These terms related to the city center are: city center, center, downtown, inner workplace zone, historical nucleous, functional nucleous, central business district (CBD) and the „city”. While in the literature abroad these terms are roughly well-bordered and used strictly, geographers in our country often use these eight words as synonyms for each other. Because of etimological and functional views I think it's worth re-defining all of the meanings and use them strictly according to their definitions. It is important to determine a static-dynamic contrast at these terms.

While the terms city center, downtown, center, historical nucleous are a static geographical or historical entity, the CBD and the city are dynamic, they have a changing and frequently growing urban geographical area.

It's important to see that while CBD can change quickly because of the depend-ence of the capital economy, the area of the city (as the command centre) containing the least common services and institutions cannot change that dynamically, as the cultural centers of the non-governmental sphere belong here.

The clarifying of these meanings not only subserve the correct use of terms, but also offers some new, undiscovered possibilities to the hungarian urban geographers to research. For example if we tried to border these areas belonging to those eight terms, or tried to compare them with other cities' bordering, that would lead to interesting results.