Thünen, Johann Heinrich von

Thünen, Johann Heinrich von (1783-1850), Prussian landowner and economic theorist best known for the model of agricultural land use that bears his name. The first coherent and quantitatively based theory of agricultural location, it was an important stimulus for the more sophisticated locational and land-use models that were developed during the so-called quantitative revolution in geography of the 1960s.

Born in Jever, Oldenburg, von Thünen in 1810 acquired an agricultural estate near the town of Rostock on the Baltic coast of Germany. From then until his death he kept detailed records of the management of the estate and the markets it supplied, on which he based his model of agricultural location, published in 1826 as Der Isolierte Staat (The Isolated State). Through it he sought to explain the principles governing the price of agricultural products and the way in which these prices controlled the pattern of land use, and thus to provide a basis for decision-making about the best form of agriculture to be carried on at a given place if farmers were to maximize their profits. In developing his model, von Thünen initially assumed the existence of a single market centre completely isolated from other centres (and thus able to determine price free from any other competition) and located in an area of physically uniform land. He further assumed that transport costs increased in direct proportion to distance, so that the cost of transporting produce grown a long way from the market would be much greater than for that grown nearby. Thus, the greatest profits would to be made from items with a relatively high price grown close to the market centre, where they would incur the lowest transport costs. As von Thünen assumed uniform physical conditions in all directions from the market, his model consists of concentric circular zones of land use focused on the market settlement, with the most intensive farming—dairying and horticulture—at the centre. As distance from the market increases, farming activities decline in intensity, with ranching taking place on the most distant land. Von Thünen recognized the highly theoretical nature of his basic model and later modified it to include another market centre and a river that could be used for lower-cost transport over the longer distances.

Such has been the appeal of the von Thünen model that other workers have sought to apply it to locations worldwide, and it has been tested in areas of the United States, Australia, and other parts of Europe. While it overlooks a considerable range of factors influencing farm production, not least non-economic ones, its value has been in its ability to provide both useful insights into the processes that determine patterns of agricultural land use around towns and cities, and a starting point for the analysis of those patterns.