Regional Science and Urban Economics 21 (1991) 647-648. North-Holland Reply to Comments by Berliant Y. Asami University of Tokyo, Tokyo. Japan M. Fujita and T.E. Smith University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. PA 19104. USA We wish to begin by thanking Marcus Berliant for his incisive comments on our paper. His efforts have already led to substantial improvements in earlier drafts of the paper, and his present comments serve to underscore a number of the more important limitations which remain. But in spite of these shortcomings, we tend to view the present results in a somewhat more positive light than Berliant. Our central goal (as with the other authors mentioned in the critique) is to clarify the behavioral meaning of the continuous land use models which have dominated the literature. In particular, it seems to us most natural to regard such population density models as limiting approximations of equilibrium locational distributions for large populations. Hence our present approach has been to examine the equilibrium population distributions for a simple class of micro location models (FL-models), and to show that (under mild regularity conditions) the relative distribution of population is uniformly approximated by the conti- nuous model as population size increases. The motivation for using relative distributional comparisons here (i.e. division by total population size N) is precisely the same as the motivation for using relative frequency comparisons in statistics; namely, that these are the only comparisons free of population size (other than artificially ratio-equivalent normalizations such as division by 2N). Hence in terms of such comparisons, our results show that equilibrium location behavior in FL-models is asymptotically well approxi- mated by the continuous model with respect to such distributional properties as: ‘half the population lives within one mile of the CBD’. In this sense, we believe that such results do lend positive support to the interpretation of continuous land use models as limiting approximations of micro location behavior. 01664462/91/$03.50 0 1991-Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved