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Document Page 38 The task is, however, a bit harder this time, because the tradition in spatial economics is both longer and more diffuse than that in development. In fact, my personal classification system identifies not one but five traditions in the field. Of these five, I will argue that four are really different ways of looking at the same thing although their proponents did not see it that way, and indeed tended to view them as rival alternatives. The fifth, the tradition of land rent/land use analysis going back to von Thünen himself, is the orphan, largely divorced conceptually from the other approaches. Not coincidentally, it is also the tradition that has been most readily embraced by mainstream economics. So let me begin my survey, with the first and, to my mind, least appealing of these traditions. Germanic Geometry When one mentions "location theory" to most economists, they think (if they think of anything) of the tradition that flourished in Germany in the first half of this century, a tradition concerned with a distinctive problem: the geometry of location on a two-dimensional landscape. It is usual to divide this tradition into two subsets. First came Alfred Weber and his followers, who analyzed the location decision of a firm serving one or more markets and relying on one or more sources of supply, with the total number of such relevant points not less than three. (Otherwise the firm would always choose to locate on top of either the input source or the market.) Then came the tradition of central-place theory, which analyzed the location and roles of manufacturing/marketing/etc. centers serving a hypothetical evenly spread agricultural population. In this tradition, Lösch had the big geometric insight that file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_38.html [4/18/2007 10:30:10 AM]
Document market areas should be hexagonal while Christaller produced the empirically fruitful idea that there should be a hierarchy of central places, with nested market areas. Page 39 Both Weberian location theory and central-place theory have been subjected to many critiques over the years, many of them focusing on the unrealism of the assumptions about the distribution of demand, the relationship between transport costs and distance, and so on. I don't think that charges of unrealism are to the point: when you are working in a very new area, it is entirely forgivable to make outrageous simplifications in pursuit of insights, with the faith that the model can be brought closer to the facts on later passes. (This is a self-serving remark, and also a preview of the third lecture.) And in any case this kind of criticism was surely not the reason why the Germanic tradition failed to make it into mainstream economics after all, one could hardly accuse J. R. Hicks, whose Value and Capital was roughly contemporary with the development of central-place theory, of robust realism. Rather, the problem with the German tradition must surely have been that it seemed to be about geometry, not about economics as the increasingly dominant Anglo-Saxon mainstream understood it. That is, it was neither a story about how sensible actors should make decisions nor a story about how the decisions of these actors might interact to produce a particular outcome. The tradition was, in fact, exasperatingly blurry about who was making what decisions, and almost completely silent on the question of how decisions of individuals might affect one another. Consider, for example, the famous problem of locating a factory so as to minimize transportation costs from several suppliers and to several markets. Who is doing the minimizing? Is this factory owned by a private firm? If so, how file:///D|/Export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=409&filename=page_39.html [4/18/2007 10:30:11 AM]
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Page 3 and 4: Document Fourth printing, 1998 Firs
Page 5 and 6: Document Preface Page vii This book
Page 7 and 8: Document Page ix limiting nature of
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Page 11 and 12: Document What links development and
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Page 15 and 16: Document The Big Push Page 8 A good
Page 17 and 18: Document Demand Demand for the N go
Page 19 and 20: Document Page 12 But even if the ec
Page 21 and 22: Document Page 14 modern sector, the
Page 23 and 24: Document Page 16 After 1960, by con
Page 25 and 26: Document Page 18 sounds as if it mu
Page 27 and 28: Document Page 20 and development in
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Page 35 and 36: Document Page 28 The exception prov
Page 37 and 38: Document 2 Geography Lost and Found
Page 39 and 40: Document Page 33 In the previous le
Page 41 and 42: Document Page 35 So why did spatial
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