Central Places: The Theories of von Thünen, Christaller, and Lösch

The question of why economic activities are concentrated in certain places and not in others, why so-called “central places” exist at which an agglomeration of people and trade takes place, and where these central places are to be found, has long been a focus of spatial economists. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three German scientists concentrated on that area, and the results of their research became famous and influential in Germany and all over the world. The three scholars in question are: Johann Heinrich von Thünen (“Der isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalökonomie,” Teil I, 1826), Walter Christaller (“Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland,” 1933) and August Lösch (“Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft,” 1940). Von Thünen was the first to develop a theory of land use, and was praised as “one of the patron saints of econometrics” by Schumpeter (1955). Christaller founded the Theory of Central Places which, in the 1950s, was the only theory “concerning systems of cities that was at all well developed” (Berry 1964) and, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, became the major concept to be applied in regional planning in Germany. Lösch, who is described as an “extraordinary personality” by Stolper in the foreword to Lösch’s book, developed the first general equilibrium concept regarding the system of locations of economic activities that had ever been presented.