local concentration to the national figure, and
location quotients have been widely used to
measure regional employment specialization.
For example, if locality A has 53.2 per cent
of its employed population working in manu-
facturing and the national percentage is 28.6,
then the quotient for region A is 53.2/
28.6¼1.86. A quotient greater than 1.0 indi-
cates greater concentration in the region than
the national norm, and a value less than 1.0
indicates relative absence. Location quotients
provide a simple way of makingeconomic
base theoryoperational. lwh
location theory A historically and intel-
lectually varied body of theory and tech-
niques concerned with theexplanationand
sometimespredictionof the location of indi-
vidual and aggregate economic activities.
Until around 1980 location theory was a dis-
tinct canon, with a well-defined history, core
issues and methods, and a roll-call of alumnae.
No more. Location theory is less shapely,
more voluminous, spilling out of its earlier
constraints, but more interesting as a result.
Scott (1976a, p. 106) claims that the first
location theorist was Sir James Steuart (1712–
80), a Scottish political economist. Most other
histories, however, start with the German loca-
tion school, whose first member was Johann
Heinrich von Thu ̈nen (1783–1850) (Blaug,
1979; Ponsard, 1983). A Prussian landowner,
agriculturalist,politicalreformer and embryonic
neo-classicaleconomist(Alfred Marshall said, ‘I
lovedvonThu ̈nenaboveallmymasters’;quoted
in Blaug, 1990, p. 23), von Thu ̈nen crafted an
abstract locationmodelusing a method he
called ‘Form der Anschaung’. Deploying calculus
andcapaciousobservationsmadefromhiscoun-
try estate, he developed a theory of concentric
agricultural land use based on the variation of
landrentby location (seevon thu ̈nen model).
Alfred Weber (1869–1958), brother of soci-
ologist Max, was a second member of the
German school (‘the true heir of von Thu ̈nen’;
Blaug, 1979, p. 28). Although much of his
work concerned cultural history, he also
experimented with a method of establishing
the most profitable location for a factory
in his quest to understand the origins of
agglomerationin an early twentieth-century
Germany racked by a pervasive sense of crisis
in its great cities. His discussion isolated
the relative geographical pull offactors of
productionconceived initially on a triangular
grid, and he used both a physical model
(the Varignon frame) as well as complex
mathematics (so complex that he needed
help from Georg Pick, the mathematician
who assisted Einstein in formulating relativity)
to derive a solution for optimal location
(minimizing costs, maximizing revenue).
August Lo ̈sch (1906–45) and Walter Chris-
taller (1893–1969) round out the school.
Christaller, who was trained as a geographer,
developedcentral place theoryin the 1930s
both to explain the location of different kinds of
services and also to undertake regional plan-
ning. Its geometries assumed a truly grotesque
form when Christaller was employed by the
Third Reich’s Planning and Soil Office in
1940: he proposed to deploy the theory to re-
configure the geography of Poland following
its depopulation by relocation, deportation
and extermination (seeholocaust). Lo ̈sch,
an economist trained at Bonn University, inde-
pendently developed his version of central
place theory during the same period, but
unlike Christaller couched it in mathematical
terms as spatial equilibrium, with services,
industry and consumers arranged within
a hexagonal net of market areas. Like
Christaller, there was anormativeimpulse to
his project, but Lo ̈sch despised Hitler (as did
Alfred Weber), and died from deprivations he
suffered in maintaining his values against those
of the Nazis (seefascism).
The contributions of the German location
school were rigorous, conceptually pointed
and abstract. Theirs was a world apart from
the a-theoretical approach that dominated
economic geographyuntil the mid-1950s,
in which location was ‘explained’ by merely
inventorying a set ofad hoc, unique geograph-
ical factors. Isard (1979, p. 9) recalls that eco-
nomic geographers at that time had ‘‘little
concern for analysis’ and that they made ‘no
attempt’ even ‘to fuse. .. location[al] factors
into a simple cost calculus’. Isard’s ownre-
gionalsciencemovement,whichfor a period
was symbiotically linked with economic
geography, helped from the outside to push the
sub-discipline into the mould of the German
locational school – and which Isard (1956) was
also concerned to extend. A similar move to
reshapethefield came from inside the discipline,
with the attempt to establish human geography
asspatial scienceduring thequantitative
revolutionof the late 1950s. Work at two of
the earliest sites of that revolution was explicitly
directed towards creating a location theory
that was systematic, general and empirically
exact: McCarty, Hook and Knox (1956) at
Iowa drew oncorrelationand regression
techniques to explain regional industrial loca-
tion, while Garrison, Berry, Marble, NystuenGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 426 31.3.2009 2:44pmLOCATION THEORY