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	Weber Industrial Location Model	Von Thünen Land-Use Model
Field	Human Geography	Human Geography
Family	Regression model	Regression model
Year of origin	1909	1826
Originator	Alfred Weber	Johann Heinrich von Thünen
Type	Least-cost theory of optimal industrial plant location	Theory of agricultural land use and land rent around a market
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).	von Thünen, J. H. (1966). Von Thünen's Isolated State (P. Hall, Ed.; C. M. Wartenberg, Trans.). Pergamon Press, Oxford. (Original work published 1826).
Aliases	Weber Least-Cost Location Model, Location Triangle Model, Weberian Industrial Location Theory, Least-Cost Location Theory	Von Thunen Model, Isolated State Model, Agricultural Location Theory, Von Thünen Rings
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.	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.