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	Von Thünen Land-Use Model	Accessibility Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1826	1959
Originator	Johann Heinrich von Thünen	Walter G. Hansen
Type	Theory of agricultural land use and land rent around a market	Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location
Seminal source	von Thünen, J. H. (1966). Von Thünen's Isolated State (P. Hall, Ed.; C. M. Wartenberg, Trans.). Pergamon Press, Oxford. (Original work published 1826).	Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.
Aliases	Von Thunen Model, Isolated State Model, Agricultural Location Theory, Von Thünen Rings	Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Accessibility analysis measures how easily opportunities — jobs, shops, clinics, parks — can be reached from a given location, combining the attractiveness (size) of destinations with the cost of travelling to them. The gravity-based formulation introduced by Walter Hansen in 1959 sums the opportunities at all destinations, each discounted by a distance-decay function of travel cost, producing a single accessibility score per origin that has become a foundational concept in transport geography and urban planning.