Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
42
Geodemographics, marketing and retail
location
Graham Clarke
social relations and shifts in national and
international political economies at the expense
of location models
per se
(see Massey and Meegan
1985 for a good illustration). All the sub-fields of
economic geography were subsequently
influenced by this theoretical shift. Retail
geography, for example, provides a good
illustration of this transformation. Despite notable
exception (see Fenwick 1978, Davies and Rogers
1984, and Ghosh and MacLafferty 1987 on site
location methods), the number of new texts on
quantitative methods for site location rapidly
diminished, while newer retail geographies based
on culture, consumption and capital came to the
fore (Wrigley and Lowe (1996) provide the best
illustration). While these new retail geographies are
in themselves important additions to the literature,
they deliberately omit location models, GIS, etc.
as if they are no longer important. Smith (1989)
summarises this 'progress': 'instead of trying to
identify the optimum site for a new supermarket
many geographers turned to identify the broader
processes in which whole landscapes were made
and remade' (p. 142). Research on site location
was now seen as politically incorrect. Clarke
(1996) provides some explanation for this. He
suggests that GIS and models produce knowledge
that proves most useful to those already powerful
groups in society within a descriptive neo-classical
economic geography still largely underpinned by
central place theory (CPT).
It could be argued that much of this damning
critique is simply wrong. First, models can be used
INTRODUCTION: QUANTITATIVE
GEOGRAPHY AND BUSINESS LOCATION
If you browse the geography student textbooks of
the 1960s and 1970s, you may be surprised now
to see how many were focused on the broad
subject of 'location analysis'. The classic works of
Haggett (1965), Harvey (1969), Haggett
et al
.
(1977) and Wilson (1970; 1974) are perhaps the
most cited of this group and were the core
readings in many geography departments at this
time. They built on classic foundations that now
seem to be rarely taught at undergraduate level—
Christaller, Lösch, von Thunen, Weber, Palander,
Reilly, etc. Although often perceived as
theoretically and mathematically complex (Peter
Gould (1972) termed Wilson's 1970 modelling
text as 'the most difficult I have ever read'), they
were arguing for an essentially applied
geography—the use of these models to help
industrialists, farmers, land-use planners, retailers,
etc. to find optimal sites to locate and reach their
markets given spatial variations in the cost of
various factors of production (remember von
Thunen himself was a farm estate manager
interested in improving the efficiency of
production and distribution). Unfortunately, this
type of economic geography rapidly fell from
grace. As Pacione notes in the introduction to this
volume, in relation to geography as a whole, the
moral high ground was captured by 'new'
geographies that emphasised the wider theoretical
frameworks concerned with underlying capitalist
