Johann Heinrich von Thünen

Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783-1850) was a German agriculturalist, farmer, landowner, and economist best known for his work on the relationship between the costs of commodity transportation and the location of production. He created the first known spatial economic model on land rent using observations he had experienced, known as the Von Thünen Model of Agricultural Land Use.
 * He was born on June 24, 1783, in Jever, Oldenburg, Germany, and died on September 22, 1850, in Tellow, Mecklenburg.
 * He is notable for his work on location theory, which he explored in his book "The Isolated State"
 * In "The Isolated State," he imagined an isolated city in the middle of a level and uniformly fertile plain without navigable waterways and bounded by a wilderness. He used this model to demonstrate methods of maximizing agricultural production in concentric zones.
 * Von Thünen's model of agricultural land use was created in 1826 before major industrialization was found in Europe and elsewhere.
 * The model was an attempt to answer the problem of balancing the cost of land rents with the most effective crops to grow.
 * Von Thünen's key assumptions in the classical model are that a city is centrally located in an "isolated state," one of the surrounding areas around a town is wilderness, land is generally flat, soil quality and climate are consistent, and transportation costs increase with distance from the city.
 * Von Thünen's work brought together the fields of economics and geography to provide insight into the effect of distance on costs for economies at different locations.