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Why? One hesitates to criticize an economist of Isard's eminence just as one hesitates to second-guess
an Albert Hirschman. Yet it seems to me at least that Isard, for all his learning and acumen, failed to
understand just what it was that had kept space out of the economic literature.
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Location and Space-Economy was in large part a work of synthesis, assembling von Thünen and
Weber, Christaller and Lösch into a manageable package. Isard's principal original contribution was to
reformulate the problem of location as a standard problem of substitution: firms, he argued, could be
viewed as trading off transportation costs against production costs just as they make any other costminimizing
or profit-maximizing decision-a perfectly correct observation. But Isard's conclusion from
this observation was that one could therefore simply view location as another choice variable in a
general equilibrium competitive model, of the kind that was coming to dominate economic analysis.
And this was simply wrong: to make any sense of the various approaches to location that he surveyed,
one must take account of increasing returns and hence of imperfect competition. Isard never actually
presented an example of a general locational equilibrium; this was no accident, because neither he nor
anyone else at that time knew how to do so.
In effect, Isard was saying to economists, ''Look! You can deal with space using the tools you already
have!" But they couldn't and so his project was doomed to failure.
Luckily for Isard and for the world, that was not the end of the story. The half-worked-out spatial
models he provided made almost no dent in economic theory, but they were undeniably useful for a
variety of practical purposes: a regional planner trying to decide where to build roads or ports may be
willing to settle for a set of schematic or suggestive
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