activities, sustained by strong formal and
informal social connections – which
Storper (1997b) labelled ‘untraded interde-
pendencies’. During the 1980s and early
1990s, ‘industrial districts’ seemed to be
the answer to every (important) location-
theoretical question. Industrial districts
were variously linked to post-fordism
(and often presumed as its characteristic
locational form); to high-tech industries
and theinformation economy(the stress
on social connections seemed uncannily
made for their study: see Saxenian, 1994);
and to an emerging institutional and
‘cultural turn’withineconomicgeog-
raphy itself.
But the shortcoming of the concept of in-
dustrial districts, as with Massey’s geological
metaphor, was its confinement to the local
rather than its ability to address ascalein-
creasingly on the lips of economic geographers
(and everyone else’s as well): the global (see
globalization). One solution was to argue
that the global was nothing more than an
interlinked set of industrial districts – Scott’s
(1998) answer, and at one time, Amin and
Thrift’s (1992) too. Another was to continue
with the network idea but to expand it to the
whole world. Location theory’s charge was to
represent and explain network relations – that
is, social and economic institutional linkages –
wherever they were found across the globe.
This approach, also called ‘the relational
turn’, drew upon actor-network theory
and was not only concerned with social and
economic relations, but with material ones too
through the incorporation of commodity
chain analysis (for examples, see Dicken,
Kelly, Olds and Yeung, 2000; Dicken, 2003;
Hughes and Reimer, 2004; Yeung, 2004).
Location theory, as its long history makes
clear, is no autonomous creation, propelled by
its own logic. The logic is only that of its
human creators, reflecting their own changing
circumstances: from life on an isolated farm to
life in an interconnectedglobe. The vitality of
location theory is a consequence of economic
geographers keeping abreast of the restless
world that they inhabit. tb
Suggested reading
Barnes (2003); Storper (1997b).
locational analysis A term best associated
with Peter Haggett’s (1965) seminal book,
Locational analysis in human geography, refer-
ring to the logically and empirically rigorous
investigation of the spatial arrangements of
phenomena and related flow patterns. The
heyday of locational analysis ingeography
was the 1960s and early 1970s, when vigorous
attempts were made to recast the discipline as
spatial science, but its roots can be traced
back to the first half of the nineteenth century
and the formation of a German school of
location theory. Although locational analy-
sis is now out of fashion in contemporary
geography, it has recently been reactivated in
economics and advertised as a component of a
new economic geography.
Haggett’s (1965, p. 1) scrupulously ordered
book was fundamentally about ‘the search
for order’, by which he meant locational
order or ‘spatial structure’, as it might be
studied in (and as)human geography.He
(re)turned to the sciencepar excellenceof spa-
tial order, geometry, which he described as
a ‘neglected tradition in geography’ (p. 15).
Accordingly, he organized his first five
substantive chapters in geometric terms (see
figure): movement – the interaction between
points;
networks – the lines of linkage among
points;
nodes – the convergence of links;
hierarchies – the differential role played by
different nodes;
surfaces – the spaces among nodes.For each of the five geometries, he deployed
rigorous theory and formal numerical methods
to analyse and explain associated location
issues: this was locational analysis.
Haggett made it clear, though, that his
approach was a continuation of the long-
standing, albeit ‘deviant’, intellectual tradition
of location theory that historically twinned
geometrical reasoning with theoretical and
empirical analysis. Its origins lie with the
nineteenth-century Prussian landowner cum
part-time geographer, Johann Heinrich von
Thu ̈nen (1783–1850), who combined meticu-
lous empiricism, theoretical innovation and a
concentric geometrical sensibility to describe
and explain location patterns of agricultural
land use (seevon thunen model). Later con-
tributors to the project, and their geometries,
included Alfred Weber (1869–1958) (indus-
trial location and triangles), and August
Lo ̈sch (1906–45) and Walter Christaller
(1893–1969) (central place theory and
hexagons). Walter Isard (1919– ), writing in
1956, nine years before Haggett, synthesized
these contributions within his own account ofGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 428 31.3.2009 2:44pmLOCATIONAL ANALYSIS