The first law of geography according to Waldo Tobler is “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”

This observation is embedded in the gravity model of trip distribution. It is also related to the law of demand, in that interactions between places are inversely proportional to the cost of travel between them, which is much like the probability of purchasing a good is inversely proportional to the cost.

It is also related to the ideas of Isaac Newton’s Law of universal gravitation and is essentially synonymous with the concept of spatial dependence that forms the foundation of geostatistics.

TOBLER, W. R. (1970). “A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region”. Economic Geography, 46(2): 234-240.

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Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_geography”
Categories: Empirical laws | Geography | Transportation planning


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