The Discovery of Central Place Theory

The Discovery of Central Place Theory

The Discovery of Central Place Theory

Christaller was determined to solve an age-old problem in human geography: how to explain the fundamental properties (size, number, and location) of settlements. Prior accounts had approached explanations in terms of geographic necessity: a city "had" to be here, not there, because of something particular about the site. It could be on a promontory near a river or at the intersection of several transportation routes. Such explanations failed because there were often comparable sites at which cities had not developed, and the transportation route explanation failed on grounds of cause and effect. Which came first? Which accounted for which? Historical studies of the formation, growth, and demise of particular cities were rich, fascinating accounts that described what happened in a particularplace, but even if such accounts were obtained forall cities, it was not clear that any general rules would emerge.

Statistical accounts could describe patterns and develop classifications, but not necessarily generate the rules or laws that Christaller sought. Christaller brought these three streams of scholarship-necessity, history, and statistics to bear on the problem of settlements. On the one hand, he was a theoretician, interested in explanations drawn from the intersections of geography, history, economics, and statistics and from the generalities of space. In so doing, he described himself as an "outsider" to all of these disciplines. On the other hand, he wasan empiricist, drawn to the details of maps and regional landscapes, to the particularities of places. What distinguished his particular approach was the interplay between theory and observation, driven by a remarkable capacity for spatial thinking. In his work, we can see a variety of comple-rrentary approaches: space as in graphics, space as in the description and analysis of patterns, space as in a structure for a model, and space as in algebraic relations in the form of hierarchies.

The observational component drew on the formative influences of hischildhood. As he reports: I continued my games with maps: I connected cities of equal size by straight lines, first of all, in order to determine if certain rules were recognizable in the railroad and road network, whether regular traffic networks existed, and, second of all, in order to measure the distances between cities of equal size. Maps again become tools for experimentation, the basis of a search for regularity, pattern, and rules. In this stage, Christaller was successful, identifying latticework patterns of spatial relation-ships that have become iconic and, to some geographers, beautiful: "Thereby, the map became filled with triangles, often equilateral triangles (the distances of cities of equal size from each other were thus approximately equal), which then crystallized as six-sided figures (hexagons)". Learning things is not limited to the scentific area.

Instead it also has relations with some other things like speaking a language or using software, including Rosetta Stone Japanese and Rosetta Stone Korean. If you have a creative mind, you will make all your own differences in the end! Lie also identified a previously known spatial relationship whereby small towns were "very frequently and very precisely 21 kilometers apart from each other." The accepted explanation was based on a day's travel by cart, the small towns serving as stopover points for travel between major cities. Understanding the reasons for the geometric pattern and this spacing regularity was the result of his theorizing, a step that took only nine months.

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