The Geography of Value: A Narrative Review of Economic Geography, from von Thunen's Isolated State to the World-System

Abstract

Economic geography asks value's oldest spatial question: where do economic activities locate, and why?—and its canon runs from Johann Heinrich von Thünen's 1826 Isolated State, whose rings priced land by transport, through Alfred Weber's 1909 industrial location, Christaller's 1933 central places, Lösch's 1940 market areas, Isard's 1956 space-economy, and Pred's 1966 spatial dynamics, into the world-system's cycles of Wallerstein and Massey's spatial divisions of labor, Krugman's 1991 new economic geography, Fujita, Krugman, and Venables's 1999 The Spatial Economy, Wallerstein's 2004 World-Systems Analysis, and Scott and Storper's 2015 urban theory. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that canon. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the location's classics, in which transport, labor, and the central places formalized the firm's and the market's geometry; the system's expansion, in which the world-system's core and periphery and the divisions of labor relocated the question at the global scale; and the increasing returns' return, in which Krugman's new economic geography and the urban theory rejoined the classics' questions with the modern tools. It is concluded that economic geography's history is one question's deepening—where value locates—answered first by the ring's geometry, then by the world's hierarchy, and now by the increasing returns' cities.