Is a much more useful term than downtown for larger cities. May be used to encompass nearby dense clusters beyond the CBD whose inclusion would be impractical in the CBD proper. A CC can have three main groups of functions, and CCs are strongest when they are strongly entwined:

Central Business Functions (CBF): These are money based, dealing with business transactions, and the creation and management of wealth and job creation

Central Social Functions (CSF): The CC’s collection of activity venues that facilitate people having enjoyable experiences with other people, usually relatives and friends, but, importantly, sometimes strangers

Central Support Functions (CSUPF): These industries support the proper operation of the CBFs and the CSFs.

Any definition of a City Central needs to have some geographic component to it. Ideally it describes the geographic areas in which the City Central socio-economic system resides. City Centrals are complex socio-economic systems and then sets the City Central boundaries based on the locations of the functionally related establishments/venues, while acknowledging that City Centrals can often be changing in geographic size and composition.

Seeing a City Central as only having central business functions will tend to exclude the housing and entertainment venues that are not marbleized within its core area, yet may be vital to its operation, while seeing it as more multifunctional will probably expand its geographic reach and increase the difficulty of identifying any hard-edge borderlines. This approach might involve identifying transition areas around its edges that stand apart from those areas that are more certainly geographically part of the City Central. Photo from Detroit, Michigan, 2021. (Milder, 2021)

Central Social Districts

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