Urban Spatial Structure was published in the autumn of 1998 in the Journal of Economic Literature, under the signature of editorialists Alex Anas, Richard Arnott and Kenneth Small. It addresses a highly debated issue, namely the impact and importance of city structures upon several features of life, including economics. The article is rather comprehensive and destined for the specialized reader, moreover when it was written in a time of major structural changes. The article brings into discussion a subject of great interest, namely the close correlation between the development of an urban center in terms of size and structure and the factors affecting this, be they of economic, social or political nature. The article is focused on the way economic growth, economic diversification and the different economic sectors that are predominant in the city determine the way a cities spreads out, but the length to which the authors go is vast in covering employment, economic growth etc. as factors influencing the way a city develops.
             Urban spatial structure, or simply urban structure, can be defined as the way of organizing the buildings, bridges, roads and any other components of the city in such a manner that is seen as effective and can foster further growth and development of the community (Knox and Marston, 2007). The article in the Journal of Economic Literature does not present a clear definition of the concept, but introduces the reader to a wide variety of related concepts, such as the decentralization of the cities. The authors base their article both on actual empirical facts, drawn from the existing reality of cities such as Chicago or New York, and on theoretical facts and a theoretical perspective, by incorporating into mathematic models the relationships between the different impacting factors and by attempting to build distinctive patterns based on these. The most relevant methods used in the article are abstracts statistica...