2.6 Service
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.