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Exeter c.b.d investigation

Exeter city centre displays the characteristics of a C.B.D with a core and a frame.

Exeter is a large city in the south west of England in the county of Devon. It is situated in mid Devon. It is the regional capital of Devon and has over 115,000 citizens .Its has a large sphere of influence and many large retail sites and has a local government.                            

 It is approximately 40miles from Plymouth the river exe runs directly through the city. The M5 motorway assists Exeter with most of it communications and trade.

                                               

                                             

A c.b.d is the central part of a city where the commercial centre is situated including a core and a frame. The characteristics of a c.b.d would be containing shops, offices and financial institutions. There is usually many busy transport systems containing busses and trains, buildings tend to be tall and high density. The C.B.D is densely populated.

A core frame model is a good way of depicting the difference between the core and the frame of a city.

A core frame model depicts different areas of a city .The core is the main part including shops offices and catering companies ,this would include places like the high street where most shopping a retail purchases take place.

A frame includes more small independent shops and offices, the frame usually includes out roads that people can use to enter of exit the main core of the city. We are trying to investigate weather it applies to Exeter clear marks should be found around the city that indicate that core and the frame exist.

We would expect Exeter to have a core frame model as it applies to most cities of a similar size.

Aims:

-Our main aim is to find out if the core frame model applies to Exeter.

To find this we researched many different things:

-Carried out pedestrian counts in different sections of the C.B.D. To detect any land use changes.

-Rate environmental factors in different areas of the C.B.D.

-Identify changes and new developments in the C.B.D.

-Made predictions of what we would find.

-Study the land use in the core and frame.

If our hypothesis is correct and the core frame models do apply to Exeter then we would expect to find many big branch stores, department stores and banks in the centre of the C.B.D.

In Exeter, the high street is the main part of the core. The core is used by these kind of stores because they are large companies competing for large profits .They want the main part of the core as this is where all people go to shop and therefore where all their trade comes from.

We would expect less popular shops outside of the core in the frame .Streets in Exeter such as Queens Street and Gandy Street are perfect examples of frame streets. They have smaller less well-known shops and have smaller income than the large stores such as Topshop/Tesco. They choose these places because the frame provides and exit from the core and therefore these shops can attract pedestrians leaving the Core to get trade.

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Methodology-

Pedestrian counts-

We used this to indicate how many people were in the core or frame. This is a particularly helpful method because it shows the land use of the core and frame. It was important that we all counted pedestrians at the same time. We predicted that there would be more people in the core than the frame as the core has more attractions within it.

Firstly, we counted how many people walked past in one direction for 2 minutes and then the other way for 2 minutes. We recorded this on our survey sheet. We ...

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