The production of services
is associated with distinctive installations and spatial
order. Helpful acts of kindness, friendship, or respect are widely practiced
throughout any human society, but another kind of services demands special
skills and appropriate equipment, and is associated with particular statuses and
performed only in certain places which we shall call service centers.
Services are performed
for people. Since service cannot be transported and
stored, the dominating factor in the location of service centers is ease of access
for their beneficiaries or consumers. Services are usually provided in close
proximity to the habitations of their users. Even many small and backward
settlements have temples and shrines where religious devotions can be carried
out, craftsmen's installations where tools and other equipment are made or
repaired, marketplaces where goods are exchanged and shops where they are
sold, a headman's hut, council house or village office in which political and
administrative functions center. In a large city, infinitely more and very
specialized service agencies are concentrated amid the large settlement they
serve.