Compare methods

	Lowry Land-Use Transport Model	Spatial Interaction Model
Field	Human Geography	Spatial analysis
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1964	1971
Originator	Ira S. Lowry	Alan Wilson (entropy-maximizing family)
Type	Spatial-interaction-based land-use and activity allocation model of a metropolitan area	Model of flows between spatial origins and destinations
Seminal source	Lowry, I. S. (1964). A Model of Metropolis (RM-4035-RC). RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA.	Wilson, A. G. (1971). A family of spatial interaction models, and associated developments. Environment and Planning A, 3(1), 1–32.
Aliases	Lowry Model, Model of Metropolis, Lowry-Garin Model, Land-Use Transport Interaction Model	gravity model, spatial interaction model, competing destinations model, mekânsal etkileşim modeli
Related	4	4
Summary	The Lowry model is the foundational operational model of urban land use, allocating where people live and where services locate around a given pattern of basic employment using spatial-interaction (gravity) distribution. Devised by Ira S. Lowry at the RAND Corporation in 1964 as 'A Model of Metropolis', it treats the city as a system in which basic jobs attract resident workers, those residents demand local services, and the resulting service jobs attract still more residents — a chain solved by iteration until the whole system balances. It launched the entire field of land-use and transport interaction modelling.	Spatial interaction models predict the volume of flows — migrants, commuters, shoppers, trade, trips — between origins and destinations as a function of the size of each place and the distance or cost separating them. By analogy to Newton's gravity, interaction rises with the 'mass' of origin and destination and falls with separation, and Wilson's 1971 entropy-maximizing family put these models on a rigorous footing for transport, migration, and retail analysis.