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Weber Industrial Location Model

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.

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Sources

  1. 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). link

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Weber's Least-Cost Theory of Industrial Location. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/human-geography/weber-industrial-location-model

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ScholarGateWeber Industrial Location Model (Weber's Least-Cost Theory of Industrial Location). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/human-geography/weber-industrial-location-model · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026