ABSTRACT
To understand how regions are or gan ized, Johann Heinrich von Thünen, a German landowner and writer, and one of the great pioneers of modern regional science and planning, wrote a seminal text, The Isolated State (1826). In it, he ima gined an ideal ‘isolated state’ in the midst of an area with no peaks and valleys to obstruct the circulation of the inhabitants, and no roads to make their movement easier. It was a highly ab stract and reductive view of the world: the middle of the state was occupied by a center that contained a market, and the sur round ing land was divided into concentric zones at increasing distance from the center. The first yielded fruits, veget ables, and dairy products; the second, mater ials for fuel and construction; the third, field crops; and the last, animals for slaughter. Peasants traveled on foot, carrying goods and animals. His ab stract description was a good repres enta tion of most of the German-speaking world at that time and it was able to help the landlords of the day better or gan ize their estates. It was reductive but it introduced key planning cat egor ies such as ‘center’, ‘location’, and ‘zones of land’ differentiated by use, rent, and yield. More im port antly, it related distance between places to cost and bene fit. It is a solid point of departure for eco nom ists and planners in our own time, according to Paul Krugman. If you sub sti tute commuters for farmers, he argues, the model helps us to understand better the spatial structure of cities and ter rit ories and the im plica tions of centralization or decentralization of regions for land values and for the quality of life. Of course, the model was too simple and too limited to be able grasp the entirety of people’s lives and the complexity of con tempor ary buildings, cities, and regions as they work and evolve in space and time. Many researchers tried to go beyond its lim ita tions, which reflected those of a closed agricultural eco nomy. One of them was the geographer Walter Christaller. He de veloped an ingenious model consisting of a hier archy of nested hexagonal patterns reflecting the multiplicity of scale of modern human settlements. Like Von Thünen’s, Christaller’s model as sumed a phys ically flat land, which, rare as it may be, fitted very well the nat urally flat regions of Poland and Ukraine. The Nazi army col on ized both areas in the early 1940s with the help of Christaller’s ideas in their globalization plans during World War II.2
