IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ajecsc/v60y2001i1p79-98.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Making the Country Work for the City: Von Thünen's Ideas in Geography, Agricultural Economics and the Sociology of Agriculture

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Block
  • E. Melanie DuPuis

Abstract

Geography, as the discipline responsible for describing the organization of space, has developed several ways of dealing with the phenomenon of the central city and its surrounding hinterlands. One of the most prominent of models used is von Thünen's Isolated State, a predictive model of how rural hinterlands organize agricultural production in relation to an urban center. Despite today's globalized food provisioning system, there are still some agricultural commodities that remain in U.S. city hinterlands. The most prominent of these is milk. The spatial organization of dairying is therefore a topic in which von Thünen's notions of centrality are still pertinent. In addition, outside of geography, his ideas had a significant effect on the agricultural economists who formulated dairy marketing policy. This paper will examine von Thünen and notions of centrality in the formulation of dairy policy in the United States. His contribution has been very important to agricultural economists and agricultural geographers but less important to sociologists of agriculture, who see the spatial organization of food production around cities due as much to contingent, local political outcomes as to law‐like notions of centrality. Comparative historical method in sociology has been particularly useful in determining the role of predictive models and contingency in determining the spatial organization of milksheds.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Block & E. Melanie DuPuis, 2001. "Making the Country Work for the City: Von Thünen's Ideas in Geography, Agricultural Economics and the Sociology of Agriculture," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(1), pages 79-98, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:60:y:2001:i:1:p:79-98
    DOI: 10.1111/1536-7150.t01-2-00055
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1536-7150.t01-2-00055
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/1536-7150.t01-2-00055?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hongyun Han & Zhen Yuan & Kai Zou, 2022. "Agricultural Location and Crop Choices in China: A Revisitation on Von Thünen Model," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(11), pages 1-13, October.
    2. E Melanie DuPuis & Daniel Block, 2008. "Sustainability and Scale: US Milk-Market Orders as Relocalization Policy," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 40(8), pages 1987-2005, August.
    3. Noël van Dooren & Brecht Leseman & Suzanne van der Meulen, 2021. "How New Food Networks Change the Urban Environment: A Case Study in the Contribution of Sustainable, Regional Food Systems to Green and Healthy Cities," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-15, January.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:60:y:2001:i:1:p:79-98. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0002-9246 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.