Walter Christaller

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Sketch by Walter Christaller

Walter Christaller (born April 21, 1893 in Berneck near Calw ; † March 9, 1969 in Königstein im Taunus ) was a German geographer and is considered the founder of the theory of central places .

Life

Walter Christaller was born in 1893 in the Black Forest as the son of the Protestant pastor Erdmann Gottreich Christaller and his wife, the well-known Protestant writer Helene Christaller . He studied economics and geography and introduced quantitative and statistical methods to geography. During his early academic years before 1914, Christaller became a member of the German Academic Freischar . In 1930 Christaller finished his economics studies at the University of Erlangen. The focus of his work was agricultural geography and urban planning in southern Germany. In his main work The Central Places in Southern Germany from 1933 he developed a theory of the central places, which he presented to the Erlangen geography professor Robert Gradmann as a dissertation. Christaller's theory was used in the Nazi state by the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung for spatial planning . His work forms the theoretical basis of the central location model that is still used today in spatial planning .

After being a member of the USPD in the early 1920s , Christaller was close to the KPD before 1933 , which is why he first went into hiding in France in 1934. Thanks to influential friends, however, he received a scholarship in 1934 and returned to Germany, completed his habilitation in 1938 at the University of Freiburg and from 1937 to 1940 was an assistant at Theodor Maunz's Institute for Local Science . In 1940 Christaller joined the NSDAP and from 1940 to 1945 he worked in the staff main office for planning and flooring in the SS planning office Reichskommissariat for the consolidation of German nationality , which fought the war of conquest in Eastern Europe, for example. T. scientifically accompanied and should legitimize. In this context he was involved in spatial planning in occupied Poland and worked on a. a. the settlement planning in individual areas (" Warthegau " and Białystok ), in which he implemented his model of central places. Christaller praised the model of the central places, according to which places are hierarchically classified according to their supply offers and each upper center is surrounded by a ring of middle centers , which in turn are surrounded by a ring of sub-centers, as an implementation of the “ leader principle ” in spatial planning.

How the system of central locations works

In 1945 he became a freelance geographer, member of the KPD, later the SPD and in 1950 he founded the German Association for Applied Geography (DVAG) together with Emil Meynen . The model of the central locations became the basis for spatial planning in the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War, coordinated by the Federal Institute for Regional Studies and Spatial Research , which was headed by Meynen until the 1960s. After 1945 he also developed spatial planning concepts for the communist regime in Poland.

The idea of ​​central locations developed by him in the 1930s was very well received by his specialist colleagues and was further developed by G. Kluczka in the 1960s in particular. It assumes that the settlements in a landscape are spatially and functionally related to one another and belong to hierarchical levels. In order to determine the central position of a settlement, nine functional areas were used, which extend over the place in the sense of a "congestion". Historians took up Christaller's thesis from the 1950s and discussed it in particular for the late Middle Ages and modern history . In 1973 D. Denecke tried to make the concept usable for older sections of the Middle Ages.

From 1996 to 2015, DVAG awarded the Walter Christaller Prize for young geographers. Due to the “knowledge about the intensity and extent of Walter Christaller's involvement in the spatial planning of the Nazi regime”, the prize was renamed the DVAG Prize for Applied Geography in 2017 .

Honors

Works (selection)

  • The central places in southern Germany. An economic-geographical study of the regularity of the distribution and development of settlements with an urban function . Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-04466-5 (reprint of Jena 1933).
  • Basic ideas for the settlement and administrative structure in the east . In: Neues Bauerntum , Vol. 32, 1940, pp. 305-312.
  • Space theory and spatial planning . In: Archive for Economic Planning , Volume 1, 1941, pp. 116–35
  • The central places in the eastern regions and their cultural and market areas, Part 1: The structure and design of the central places in the German East. Koehler, Leipzig 1941
  • Country and city in the German people's order, in Zs. Deutsche Agrarpolitik , 1, 1942, pp. 53–56
  • Contributions to a geography of tourism . In: Erdkunde , Vol. 9, 1955, pp. 1-19.
  • The hierarchy of cities . In: Knut Norborg (Ed.): Proceedings of the IGU Symposium in Urban Geography, Lund, 1960 , No. 24, 1962, pp. 3-11. (Lund Studies in Geography, Ser.B, Human Geography).
  • with Hans-Richard Fischer: Our earth . Stuttgart house library, Stuttgart 1958.
  • Some Considerations of Tourism Location in Europe . In: Papers, Regional Science Association . Vol. 12, 1964, pp. 95-105.
  • How I discovered the Theory of Central Places: A Report about the Origin of Central Places . in: PW English, RC Mayfield (Ed.): Man Space and Environment . Oxford Univ. Press, 1972, pp. 601-610.

Literature about Walter Christaller

  • Götz Aly , Susanne Heim : thought leaders of annihilation. Auschwitz and the German plans for a new European order , 2004 (first 1991), ISBN 3-596-11268-0 .
  • Peter Jüngst et al. (Ed.): Geography and National Socialism. 3 case studies on the institution of geography in the German Reich and Switzerland (= urbs et regio; 51). University, Kassel 1989, ISBN 3-88122-456-4 , contains a study on the history of the geographical institutes in Freiburg (M. Rössler) and Münster (M. Fahlbusch).
  • Trevor Barnes / Claudio Minca: Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller . In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (3), pp. 669-687 (2013).
  • Karl R. Kegler: Walter Christaller , in: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften . Munich, Saur 2008, pp. 89-93, ISBN 978-3-598-11778-7 .
  • Karl R. Kegler: German spatial planning. The model of the "central places" between the Nazi state and the Federal Republic . Schöningh, Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-506-77849-9 .
  • Karl R. Kegler: Central Places. Transfer as »normalization« , in: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies Vol 15, No 1 (2016), pp. 36–80, ISSN  1492-9732 .
  • Mechtild Rössler: Science and living space. Geographical research on the East under National Socialism . Reimer, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-496-00394-4 .
  • Joachim Trezib: Transnational ways of spatial planning. The Israeli National Plan of 1951 and its reception of the theory of »central places« , in: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 1 (2014), pp. 11–35.
  • Joachim Trezib: The theory of the central places in Israel and Germany. On Walter Christaller's reception in the context of Sharonplan and “Generalplan Ost” . De Gruyter / Oldenbourg, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-033813-3 .
  • Klaus M. Schmals (Ed.): 50 years ago ... spatial planning also has a history . IRPUD, Dortmund 1997, ISBN 3-88211-099-6 .
  • Ute Wardenga / Norman Henniges / Heinz Peter Brogiato and Bruno Schelhaas: The Association of German Professional Geographers . A socio-historical study of the early phase of the DVAG . (= forum ifl 16), Leipzig 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl R. Kegler: Walter Christaller. In: Michael Fahlbusch , Ingo Haar , Alexander Pinwinkler (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. Actors, networks, research programs. With the assistance of David Hamann. 2nd completely revised and expanded edition. Vol. 1, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-042989-3 , pp. 123–128, here 123.
  2. ↑ Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller , Trevor J. Barnes and Claudio Minca, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (3) 2013, 669–687, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00045608.2011.653732
  3. ^ Joachim Trezib: Transnational ways of spatial planning. The Israeli National Plan of 1951 and its reception of the theory of »central places« , in: Zeithistorische Forschung 01/2014, pp. 11–35, here p. 33.
  4. ↑ Walter Christaller: Basic thoughts on the settlement and administrative structure in the east , in: Neues Bauerntum 32 (1940), pp. 305-312, here p. 306.
  5. ↑ DVAG: Call for applications: DVAG Prize for Applied Geography 2017 , accessed June 5, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Christaller, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geographer
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Berneck, today in Altensteig near Calw
DATE OF DEATH March 9, 1969
Place of death Königstein im Taunus