CityReads│Notes from the Underground: the History of CPT
Relying on sources literally found underground, I present the 20th-century development of central place theory(CPT), associated with two economic geographers: the German, Walter Christaller (1893–1969), and the American, Edward L. Ullman(1912–76).
Source: Barnes, T.J. 2012. Notes from the underground: why the history of economic geography matters: the case of central place theory, Economic Geography,88(1):1–26.
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The title of this article, Notes from the Underground, is inpired by Dostoevsky, elaborating my framework and general argument: that the history of the discipline matters. We are all, to paraphrase Keynes, “slaves of some defunct” economic geographer.
My second argument suggests that particularly potent periods for the transformation of ideas in economic geography is during war. During wars, ideas are melted down, recast, drawing in a multitude, and mobilized for ends both noble and heinous. Here I discuss the history of central place theory. Central place theory was crucial to geography’s quantitative revolution. Marie-Claire Robic wrote that “owing to its spatial oriented view, its theoretical aim, and its focus on urban issues, [central place theory] became during the 1960s the central point of reference for the ‘new geography.’ ” I argue that the origins and deployment of central place theory are uncompromisingly social, found in the historical underground of economic geography. To understand central place theory requires historical excavation, bringing it up to the surface into the critical light of day.
My intention is to plumb below the exterior of central place theory, to bring back stories from its historical underground. Sometimes those stories were not told because they were officially secret, stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” locked away. Other times, they were not told because no one wanted to hear them. When they surface, like Underground Man, they can be disturbing, even shocking.
I begin the remembering with Photograph of two men standing outside a lecture hall at the University of Lund, Sweden, on a Monday morning, August, 15, 1960. The frail, aged-looking man on the right is the renowned German geographer Walter Christaller, although at that moment he was not as renowned as he would be by the time he died nine years later. The much more robust-looking man to the left is the American geographer, Edward Ullman, a professor of geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. Christaller had just given the plenary lecture at the International Geographical Union(IGU) Symposium in Urban Geography, and Ullman was the principal discussant.
Maybe it was predestined that these two men would meet and have this photograph taken of them. Over the previous 30 years or so, there were uncanny parallels between their lives. Both claimed to have invented central place theory, the origins of which in each case were early encounters as boys with maps and gazetteers; both were employed as geographic experts during World War II; and both worked on top-secret wartime projects.
In addition, both wrote against the grain of their respective dominant national disciplinary traditions of regional geography, striving instead for theory, rational systematicity, prediction, and intervention. Furthermore, both had trouble with postwar academia, but both unflaggingly continued to proselytize central place theory, which, by the end of their respective lives, had become the discipline’s most famous, if not its only, indigenous formal theory, yielding each man a clutch of honors, awards, and medals.
The IGU symposium at Lund at which Christaller and Ullman met marked a sea change in human geography. For the first time, there was a concerted international effort to practice human geography as a hard science. Consequently, the participants talked formal theory, engaged in the quantitative testing of abstract models, attempted scientific prediction, and even walked the walk of laboratory-like interventions.
The reason Christaller was invited to give the opening plenary and Ullman was invited to go next is that they were both associated with the development of a crucial theory in the emergence of the “new geography,” central place theory. This theory was the jewel in the crown. But where had that jewel come from? Underground.
Born in 1893, Christaller was 19 years older than Ullman. Consequently, he got to central place theory first. His early academic career, though, was intermittent. His undergraduate education began in 1913, and, over the following 17 years, involved studies in several universities before he finally received his Diploma in Economics at the University of Erlangen in 1931 (Hottes et al. 1977, 11; Rössler 1989, 431). Hottes et al. (1977, 11) suggested that Christaller’s intention at Erlangen was to continue to study economics, but because he “found no response from the economists,” he went back to his childhood interests and asked the biogeographer and regionalist Robert Gradmann in the Geography Department to supervise his doctoral dissertation. His thesis was written in nine months, completed in 1932. The thesis was published the following year in Jena as Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (later translated into English as Central Places in Southern Germany; Christaller 1966).
On July 1, 1940, Christaller had joined the Nazi Party and was working for Heinrich Himmler’s SS. It is not entirely clear why Christaller joined the Nazis. He had been a socialist and member of the Social Democratic Party, and had even fled to France briefly in 1934 after Hitler banned his political party.
Christaller was lured back from France in 1934 by the offer of work from Konrad Meyer, professor of agronomy at the University of Berlin from December 1934, and an SS member from June 1933. Konrad Meyer was a key academic administrator for the Nazis. Konrad Meyer was the principal architect of the General Plan for the East, a top-secret plan, produced and overseen by the SS.
Christaller chose to return to Nazi Germany after he fled to France in 1934. Moreover, he came back not anonymously, to slip invisibly into the background, but instead to work in the belly of the beast for Konrad Meyer and the SS. Christaller worked in the Planning and Soil Department in Meyer’s main Berlin office. He assisted in planning Germany’s newly acquired Eastern territories, culminating in the General Plan for the East. He was a Nazi and explicitly engaged in projects to further the realization of the Third Reich.
In contrast, August Lösch managed to work in a governmental institute throughout the war but neither joined the Nazi Party nor contributed to “Drang nach Osten” (“the drive toward the east”).
Key Nazi power holders may have been irrational, but they provided large-scale opportunities for science and technocracy to remake the world. Such Promethean ambition also hailed. Under Nazism, “young, career-minded technocrats and academics . . . regarded Europe . . . as a drawing board on which to work out their grand designs. For them Eastern Europe was one vast wasteland crying out for ‘readjustment’ and ‘reconstruction.’ ” While there were certainly cases of compulsory enrollment of academics in the Nazi project, the “numerous examples of stepping into line” were more common.
All this applies to Christaller. Christaller’s academic career had not been successful. Economists were not interested in his proposed doctoral work, which explains why Christaller sought out Robert Gradmann in a Geography Department. But even in geography, the responses to Christaller’s work were muted. Christaller’s theoretical bent and deductive inclinations, his talk of laws, regularities, and mathematics, were antithetical to the prevailing Germanic tradition of regional geography.It was precisely that regional tradition, of course, that Hartshorne (1939) documented so assiduously in his The Nature. Hartshorne made the German regional tradition the disciplinary blueprint for American geography. But in spite of Hartshorne’s encyclopedic reference list, many items of which were in German, Christaller’s Central Place Theory in Southern Germany never made it into his bibliography, even though we know that the University of Wisconsin, where Hartshorne taught, had a copy of the book.
One group responded favorably to Christaller, however. This group recognized the potential of central place theory, and consequently hailed him, offered him an opportunity to be “relevant,” to be close to the action, to treat Eastern Europe as a drawing board: Konrad Meyer and the Nazis. Christaller’s central place theory was attractive to Meyer and the Nazis partly because it contained within its very structure National Socialism’s oxymoronic combination of rationalism and irrationalism.It was central place theory’s ability to inhabit this oxymoron that, in part, made it amenable to the Nazi project of reconstructing the East. The implementation of Christaller’s central place theory could realize in the newly German-occupied territories.
After World War II was over, Konrad Meyer was tried for war crimes at Nuremburg. Christaller provided one of the so-called white wash papers used in Meyer’s defense. The argument at Nuremburg turned on whether Generalplan Ost was ever implemented. The judges concluded that it was not. Generalplan, instead, was pronounced “a strictly independent scientific study”. Consequently, Meyer was convicted of the least serious charge with which he was indicted. He was later made professor of land planning at the University of Hanover in 1956.
Christaller, in contrast, was never offered an academic job. In large part, he was not because in 1945 he became a member of the German Communist Party and accused in 1953 of working for the East Germans. After the theory was sufficiently mangled with the emerging spatial science movement in North America, to which Ullman significantly contributed, Christaller was finally called back from the wilderness and invited to present the inaugural paper at the 1960 IGU symposium in Lund.
Ullman said throughout his life, including perhaps uncharitably at the IGU symposium at Lund in front of Christaller, that Christaller beat him to the invention of central place theory. He claimed independent discovery in 1938 as a beginning doctoral student at the University of Chicago. As he put it in a 1972 Geographers on Film interview with Preston James, “suddenly the idea came to me,” as well as the realization that “this was going to be my life’s work” . When Ullman said that he invented central place theory, he meant that he had an idea, but one that was never comprehensively or formally developed.
In 1938 Ullman visited Harvard University, where he was previously an assistant and master’s degree student in geography. “Everybody” there told him to see a visiting German professor of spatial economics, August Lösch, and on the eve of Lösch returning to Germany, Ullman did so. Lösch had received a Rockefeller Fellowship to travel around the United States and Canada to gather data for what would be his own version of central place theory, published in 1940 as Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft (translated as The Economics of Location; Lösch 1954). As Ullman told the story: “I described my idea to [Lösch] and a strange light came in his eyes. And he wrote down on a piece of paper, ‘You should see Walter Christaller in Deutschland.’ Ullman kept that piece of paper in his wallet for much of his life, taking it out at opportune moments.
Ullman followed up Lösch’s tip but not until the following year. On November 30, 1939, Ullman wrote a letter to Harris saying, “I just read Christaller’s book, which I borrowed from Wisconsin” .Ullman subsequently translated Christaller’s book. Louis Wirth, the urban sociologist at the University of Chicago, heard of the translation, and, according to Ullman, said,“I’ll publish that in the American Journal of Sociology” . In 1941, as a 29-year-old geography graduate student, Ullman saw perhaps his most successful paper “The Theory of Location of Cities,” a condensed summary of Christaller’s book, appear in the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association.
Not that many American geographers read it. One reason was the dominance of Richard Hartshorne’s (1939) The Nature of Geography published two years earlier, which presented an opposing conception of geography. Inspired by German scholarship, albeit not of the Christallerian kind, Hartshorne believed that because of the uniqueness of the region, the object of investigation of geography, no lawlike generalities of the form given by the “natural” or “exact” sciences was possible. Consequently, we cannot explain or predict or knowingly intervene, merely describe. Ullman and Christaller, however, were concerned precisely with explanation, prediction, and, above all, knowing intervention, embodied in central place theory.
There was another reason why few American geographers read Ullman’s paper. Within six months of its publication, the United States entered World War II. On December 8, Ullman was invited by Captain Hart at the Office of the Co-ordinator of Information (OCI), the predecessor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and, in turn, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to accept a research position in military intelligence. Ullman would not be seeing Christaller in Deutschland any time soon.
Ullman was demobilized in May 1946 and returned to the academy. He was stymied on his first attempt at Harvard University, however, when James Conant, the university president, closed the geography program in 1948 because he thought that geography was “not a university subject”.
Ullman wanted to practice a new geography. Consequently, he packed his bags and left for the University of Washington, Seattle in 1952. Ullman pursued the new geography along with their graduate students. Perhaps the crowning glory was the collective volume, Studies of Highway Development and Geographic Change.Crammed with calculations, data matrices, statistical techniques, cost curves, and demand schedules, it was revolutionary book. The theoretical inspiration was central place theory. Ullman’s project from that point forward, especially in the hands of the space cadets, was one in which central place theory was subject to increasing technical scientific refinement and formalization. But along with greater mathematics went greater historical and political amnesia. Central place theory’s wartime connections were erased, leaving only the equations.Christaller was finally redeemed in his own discipline, and Ullman, too, showing that geography was university worthy after all.
In literally thousands of accounts of central place theory, there is rarely a mention of war, economic geography’s historical underground, or the processes unfolding there. The theory is presented as orderly and unsullied, the tidy arrangement of a spotless logic untouched by history. In contrast, my account of central place theory has emphasized the charged, complex, and messy role of history in which theory is inextricably caught. As Oscar Wilde might have said, theory is rarely pure and never simple.
In contrast, the purpose of my article was to remember rather than to forget. Once you go into the archives, are antirationalist, take soundings beneath the surface plane, and countenance critique, a different, much darker, central place theory emerges. It is a central place theory in which the history of economic geography matters. As a discipline, we need to wake up. If we do not, we will only repeat history rather than make it. Economic geography can make history but only if it remembers its own.