Spatial development plans often aim at defining the level of hierarchy to assign to the urban centers of a region, each level being characterized by a class of facilities. The services provided at the facilities typically include education, health care, public safety, and justice. In this paper we present a multiperiod, multilevel location model for urban hierarchy planning. The objective of the model is to maximize the aggregate accessibility of population to the different classes of facilities, taking explicitly into account the fact that location decisions influence the spatial distribution of population growth. The model was applied to a problem dealt with in Portugal during the preparation of the Centro Region Development Plan 1994: the redefinition of the regions' urban hierarchy. The results obtained through the model demonstrate its potential usefulness in real-world applications.

Spatial planners often make “comprehensive” decisions on the location of public service facilities by using the concept of urban hierarchy: population centers at the upper level of the hierarchy (typically large cities) get the highest level facilities, such as specialized hospitals and universities, while the centers at the lower levels of hierarchy get lower-level facilities. Intuitively, this suggests that there should be a link between urban hierarchy designations and population dynamics in future periods. This link must be taken into account in planning decisions, as it suggests that today’s decisions affect tomorrow’s demand for services. Indeed, this link was assumed in a previously published planning model. Yet, no direct evidence of such a link appears in the literature. The primary goal of this article is to fill this gap by using the census data for Portugal for the period 1991–2001 and the changes in the urban hierarchy that were implemented during 1980s and early 1990s. While our results support the link between urban hierarchy designations and population dynamics that has been assumed in previously published work, the mechanism describing this link appears to be somewhat different from the one postulated previously. Several extensions and directions for future work are also discussed.