Von Thünen Land-Use Model

The von Thünen model is the founding theory of agricultural land use, explaining how the pattern of farming around a market emerges from transport costs and land rent. Set out by Johann Heinrich von Thünen in his 1826 work Der isolierte Staat, it imagines an isolated city on a uniform plain and shows that the rent a farmer can pay for land falls with distance to the market, so different crops and farming intensities sort themselves into concentric rings around the city. It is the earliest formal model in economic geography and the ancestor of bid-rent and urban land-use theory.