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lattice of central places with hexagonal market areas: Lösch vindicated. I am less confident but hopeful
that in a model with two or more manufacturing sectors characterized by different scale economies or
transport costs the approach will yield Christaller-type hierarchies. I even have a fantasy that in a manysector
model there will emerge some deep justification for the rank-size rule, though that may be too
much to hope for.
The Moral of the Story
As you can no doubt tell, I am excited by all of this. But while it was important for me to explain at
least briefly the kind of formalization that, to me at least, makes sense of all these spatial economic
traditions, the point for these lectures is not to emphasize the specific models that make up my current
research. The point is, instead, to realize that in economic geography as in development economics, the
unwillingness of mainstream economists to think about what they could not formalize led them to
ignore ideas that turn out, in retrospect, to have been very good ones. Central-place theory is a powerful
organizing principle for looking at and thinking about urban systems and in only slightly modified form
it turns out to make sense in terms of a rigorous economic model. Market potential is an extremely
useful empirical concept for measuring market access and it too, in slightly modified form, turns out to
make sense in terms of a rigorous model. Circular and cumulative causation is a compelling image that
helps you to think about the evolution of regional economies and it is eminently sensible in terms of
modern economic models. Yet all of these ideas were essentially exiled from economic theory, if they
were ever allowed in in the first place. The
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