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	Weber Industrial Location Model	Central Place Analysis
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Regression model	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1909	1933
Originator	Alfred Weber	Walter Christaller
Type	Least-cost theory of optimal industrial plant location	Theory and analytic framework for the size, number, and spacing of settlements
Seminal source	Weber, A. (1929). Alfred Weber's Theory of the Location of Industries (C. J. Friedrich, Trans.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. (Original work published 1909).	Christaller, W. (1966). Central Places in Southern Germany (C. W. Baskin, Trans.). Prentice-Hall. (Original work published 1933). ISBN: 9780131226302
Aliases	Weber Least-Cost Location Model, Location Triangle Model, Weberian Industrial Location Theory, Least-Cost Location Theory	Central Place Theory, Christaller Central Place Model, Settlement Hierarchy Analysis, Central Place Hierarchy
Related	4	4
Summary	Weber's industrial location model is the classic least-cost theory of where a manufacturing plant should locate. Developed by Alfred Weber in 1909, it finds the site that minimizes total transport cost between the sources of raw materials and the market, then adjusts that site for savings in labour cost and for the benefits of clustering with other firms. The transport optimum is found at the Weber point of the location triangle, where the pulls of material sources and the market balance — the foundational model of industrial geography.	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.