Compare methods

	Von Thünen Land-Use Model	Central Place Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1826	1933
Originator	Johann Heinrich von Thünen	Walter Christaller
Type	Theory of agricultural land use and land rent around a market	Theory and analytic framework for the size, number, and spacing of settlements
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).	Christaller, W. (1966). Central Places in Southern Germany (C. W. Baskin, Trans.). Prentice-Hall. (Original work published 1933). ISBN: 9780131226302
Aliases	Von Thunen Model, Isolated State Model, Agricultural Location Theory, Von Thünen Rings	Central Place Theory, Christaller Central Place Model, Settlement Hierarchy Analysis, Central Place Hierarchy
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.	Central place analysis is the study of the size, number, and spacing of settlements as service centres, grounded in Walter Christaller's central place theory of 1933. It explains why settlements form an orderly hierarchy — many small villages, fewer towns, a handful of cities — and why higher-order centres are spaced farther apart and offer more specialized goods, deriving the famous nested pattern of hexagonal market areas from two economic concepts: the range and the threshold of a good.