Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Though spatial economics made much progress, there remains still something
to learn from German “Raumwirtschaft”. Some pieces are useless, indeed, not to
speak about Weigmann's writings that became part of an ideology leading to a
historical catastrophe. I do not see much lasting value in Weber's contribution,
despite the fact that he was the most influential. Even as the grandfather of the
operations research literature on location, not he but Launhardt is the one to
whom the honour is due.
What remains are important, though largely non-coherent pieces.
1. The first is Th¨nen's land use and land rent theory, updated by Launhardt, a
strong piece of what we nowadays would call neoclassical perfect compe-
tition equilibrium theory. It is admirable and undervalued in the literature.
Almost unknown is Th¨nen's clear exposition on the endogenous forces
determining the configuration and distribution of cities in homogeneous
space. Krugman would probably have written less pejorative about the
German tradition if he had studied Th¨nen's respective chapter.
2. Second, there is the Historical School, with interesting and lasting ideas and
observations on agglomeration economies, innovation, learning in large cities
and other issues that modern empirical economic geography focuses
on. Empirical economic geography studying agglomeration and knowledge
should refer to Roscher rather than Marshall as their master.
3. Third, there is Launhardt's early contribution to the theory of imperfect
competition in space, almost unknown until these days,
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carried on by
Schneider.
4. And finally, fourth, there is Central Place Theory, in particular L¨sch. I
disagree with Krugman to put L
¨
sch with Weber into one box called “Ger-
manic Geometry” (Krugman
1995
, 38). I only partly agree with his verdict
that L
¨
sch presents a planning rather than a market solution. On occasion,
L
¨
sch in fact confuses market equilibrium and planning optimum. But his
approach is definitely a theory of markets, even if his application of
Chambelin's model to a spatial economy has its deficiencies. I do fully
agree with Krigman's “moral of the story”, that “
...
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” (Krugman
1995
, 64).
The latter statement refers to the endogenous emergence of central places in a
new economic geography framework in continuous space, with several
industries and with land used for agricultural production (Fujita et al.
1999
). If
in addition one allows for several agricultural goods differing with regard to
transport cost per mile and unit of land one would also obtain Th¨nen-like zones
of agricultural land use. In this sense one could say that Th¨nen and L¨sch are in
modern theory
aufgehoben
. The word “aufgehoben” is a philosophical term used
5
Dos Santos Ferreira and Thisse (
1996
), who discovered in Launhardt's topic an elegant way to
combine horizontal and vertical product differentiation, are an exception.
