Introduction

Geography in the Nordic countries has long experienced a close yet often tense relationship with spatial planning. Sweden is no exception. From the mid-1950s and a few decades onwards, Swedish human geography was strongly focused on regional planning. In this chapter, we examine the influence of the German geographer Walter Christaller’s (1966 [1933]) central place theory on Swedish human geography and the closely related emergence of a distinctive kind of Swedish “planning-geography” (Mels, 2012). Originally developed to explain the distribution of towns in southern Germany in the early twentieth century, Christaller’s theory came to be used by geographers and planners across the world in the decades after World War II (Berry & Garrison, 1958; Barnes, 2012; Barnes & Abrahamsson, 2017). In Sweden, the theory played a key role in the development of the rapidly expanding welfare state. This ambitious political project created a demand for new knowledge and tools which could help realise the goal to provide all citizens with equal access to quality public services (Åmark, 2005). For some time, the development of human geography in Sweden was heavily geared towards these efforts.

While central place theory influenced both spatial planning and the subject of human geography in all of the Nordic countries (see for example Illeris et al., 1966; Sjøholt, 1981; Granö, 2005; Dale & Sjøholt, 2007), this chapter is primarily concerned with the Swedish context and the work of the geographers at Lund University, particularly that of Torsten Hägerstrand and Sven Godlund. The reasons for this are twofold. First, the growing popularity of Christaller’s theory reflected a broader shift within geography towards quantitative approaches, one which was especially strongly manifested at the geography department in Lund. Second, the Swedish case offers an instructive example of how scientific knowledge can be translated into political reforms and the kinds of relationships that can emerge between researchers and policymakers. By involving themselves in regional planning, geographers created a demand for planners with geographical training, and academic geographers were frequently called upon as experts on planning matters. Through a series of major welfare reforms and infrastructure projects in which geographers played a key role, Sweden was quite literally restructured in the image of central place theory.

In the early 1970s, however, a number of geographers strongly criticized how the reliance on reductive theories such as that of Christaller and the extensive focus on planning constrained the academic development of the discipline. Moreover, the influence of central place theory on geographical research decreased when the expansive phase of the Swedish welfare state ended in the 1980s. When the politics and material conditions which had made the theory popular changed, its usefulness soon declined. In hindsight, it is evident that the theory only allowed for overly simplified analyses of socio-spatial relations, but that its proliferation nonetheless contributed to the transformation of Swedish human geography into a modern social science. In essence, central place theory advanced a comparatively novel understanding of space which contributed to the development of more complex and philosophical theories and approaches to geography, such as Hägerstrand’s concept of time geography.

Central Place Theory in Theory

Walter Christaller first presented his theory in his dissertation The Central Places in Southern Germany (Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland) (1966 [1933]). As a number of scholars have demonstrated, his subsequent career was intimately associated with the Third Reich. During his time working at the Planning and Soil Department (Stabshauptamt für Planung und Boden), part of the Commissariat for the Strengthening of Ethnic Germandom (Dienststelle des Reichskommissars für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums), an organisation headed by the Schutzstaffel leader Heinrich Himmler, Christaller was intimately involved in the making of the genocidal Generalplan Ost. The plan outlined a blueprint for the post-war German colonization of Eastern Europe, a project centred around the murder and enslavement of tens of millions Soviet and Eastern European residents (Rössler, 1989; Barnes & Minca, 2013; Kegler, 2015). After the war, Christaller’s superiors were acquitted in Nürnberg on basis of the argument that Generalplan Ost was never fully realized, yet as he and his colleagues were in all likelihood aware, the plan contributed to the genocide on the Eastern Front (Aly & Heim, 2002, p. 289). These circumstances, however, did not affect the popularity of Christaller’s theory after World War II, and Swedish geographers paid little attention to his Nazi past (Hägerstrand, 1959; Wikman, 2019, p. 53).

At heart, central place theory is a spatial model of market interactions. It posits a hierarchical relationship between towns based on what services and goods are available. Whether a town has a high or low level of centrality is determined by the size of its surrounding area (umland). The size of the surrounding area is measured by examining the distance people are willing to travel to access goods and services. Towns to which people are willing to travel a long distance are located at a higher point in the central place hierarchy. Most applications of the theory use an index of the availability of goods and services to measure each town’s level of centrality. Since people travel further to buy rare goods (such as fridges) than common goods (such as milk), towns where rare goods or services are available obtain higher scores in the centrality index.

The localization of towns had traditionally been explained with reference to the proximity to waterways, natural resources, or other topographical factors. By contrast, central place theory posited that economic activity was the most critical factor. The sole focus on economic activity made the theory nominally applicable to most industrialized societies regardless of their geographical conditions. Christaller’s framework thus offered a highly flexible model for “translating” societies into economic relations (Christaller, 1966 [1933], p. 16–18). Since the theory was developed with economic relations at its core, its “ideal” world was flat. In a theoretically flat world, transport costs (what Christaller referred to as “economic distance”) is the only factor that influences travel times. The theory furthermore assumes an even distribution of the population. Accordingly, towns in a flat world of this kind would be evenly spatially distributed. Smaller towns would be located in the surrounding areas of larger towns, and these, in turn, would be located in the surrounding areas of even larger cities. Each town would thus belong to a different level in the central place hierarchy. If one draws a map of this flat world with an evenly distributed population, the towns will be located in a hexagonal pattern (Fig. 3.1). The corner of each hexagon will be a central place with a surrounding area in the shape of a smaller hexagon, in a theoretically infinite fractal pattern (Christaller, 1966 [1933], p. 58–80).

Fig. 3.1
An illustration of an ideal world with an evenly distributed population, the towns will be located in a hexagonal pattern according to the central place theory.

An example of an ‘ideal’ world planned and organized in accordance with the principles of central place theory. (Authors’ own elaboration)

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The hexagon has become the iconic image of central place theory, representing the “ideal” central place world. As with all ideals, this world rarely fully corresponds to reality. When central place indexes of actual towns with actual surrounding areas were created, they did not look like hexagons, but the towns could still be placed in a central place hierarchy (King, 1984). For the users and supporters of Christaller’s theory, his framework provided an ideal organization of space against which reality could be tested and contrasted. In other words, the theory made it possible to compare the actual spatial organization of a country or region to an ideal flat and hexagonal world. Critically, the theory could be used to analyse all forms of goods and services, and it could easily be scaled up or down depending on what level one wished to investigate. The world looked different through the lens of central place theory: it helped geographers to interpret the world and enhanced the possibilities of policymakers to change it. The deviations from the ideal provided insights into where reform efforts should be directed. As we will see, this was one of the core reasons behind the popularity and diffusion of the theory.

Post-war Social Science and Geography in Sweden

The most significant theoretical and methodological transformation of geography during the twentieth century was the shift away from regional geography – the largely descriptive and historical approach to geography that dominated Anglophone, German, French, and Scandinavian geography from the 1870s until World War II – towards quantitative, model-based approaches (Barnes, 2001). In the 1950s, a quantitatively oriented urban geography became an increasingly important field in Anglo-American geography. This interest eventually contributed to the creation of what became known as regional science (Barnes, 2004). In Sweden, however, descriptive regional geography was still influential, although Swedish geographers – particularly economic geographers – were quite familiar with quantitative urban geography (Pred, 1983). In the immediate post-war period, the methodological shift towards quantitative approaches that would redefine the discipline in the coming decades had already begun (Buttimer & Mels, 2006, pp. 52–60).

After World War II, Swedish higher education was significantly reformed. New disciplines, including human geography, were provided with their own departments at the public universities. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, in Sweden, unlike the other Nordic countries, geography was formally split into physical geography and human geography with separate departments. A new research council for the social sciences (Samhällsvetenskapliga forskningsrådet) was created in 1947 (Nybom, 1997, pp. 64–104). In 1950, the council organized a major conference in Uppsala which gathered social scientists from all the disciplines the council represented. The intention was to provide researchers from each discipline with the opportunity to discuss in what direction they were heading (Wikman, 2019, pp. 71–73).

The human geography sub-conference was titled Towns and their surrounding areas (Tätorter och omland) (Enequist, 1951; Forsberg, 2021). Since geography had historically been a wide-ranging but unified discipline, there was an evident need to define human geography anew and discuss what human geographers ought to be doing. The conference was attended by most of the geographers working at Swedish universities, including the three central actors this chapter is concerned with, all of whom worked at the Department of Geography at Lund University: Torsten Hägerstrand and Sven Godlund, two younger researchers who had yet to complete their dissertations, and the Estonian-Swedish geographer Edgar Kant. Hägerstrand would eventually become one of Sweden’s most renowned geographers. Godlund, on his side, did not reach the same international fame but became an influential geographer in the Swedish context. Kant, who significantly influenced Swedish geography in ways we will explore further below, came to Sweden from Estonia as a refugee in 1944 and spent the remainder of his career at the department in Lund (Tammiksaar et al., 2018).

At the conference in Uppsala, Kant suggested that geography was an “amphibious” discipline, neither a social nor a natural science, but rather a hybrid of the two (Kant, 1951, p. 19). These comments were directed at the relationship between human and physical geography. Yet the amphibious qualities of human geography can also be said to pertain to the relationship between geographers and policymakers. Although the boundaries between science and politics are never stable or uncomplicated, human geographers in post-war Sweden – perhaps due to the amphibious nature of the discipline – proved to be very adept at navigating these complicated boundaries.

Boundaries, Translations, and Mobile Models

Thomas Gieryn’s (1999) writings on boundary work are helpful for analysing how the boundaries between science and politics are created and maintained. Gieryn argues that students of science should not primarily investigate what science is but rather where science is. Knowledge that comes to be accepted as scientific is produced, and it is possible to examine where this production takes place. To this end, he uses the metaphor of a “cultural map”. Science and other cultural phenomena can be understood as nations on a map. Maps are used to navigate the world, and cultural maps are used to navigate culture. They show where different phenomena begin and end, and politics and science are located at different places on the map. Yet the boundaries are far from fixed: they are continually moved, erased, and renegotiated. The desirable places on the map, such as science, are always contested. Actors who are not included within the boundaries of science are trying to redraw them at the same time as those located within them seek to defend their positions. When the boundaries between science and politics are blurred, the knowledge scientists produce can become less credible; social scientists who engage in policymaking risk losing their autonomy. At the same time, to do so potentially offers them the power to influence the societies they study.

Notably, the transformation of human geography into a planning science and the highpoint of the popularity of central place theory coincided with the period when the Nordic welfare states were significantly expanded. In the United States, during the Cold War, the military contributed significant funding to and made use of social science (Lowen, 1997; Simpson, 1998; Mirowski, 2002; Solovey, 2013). In the Nordic countries, the expanding welfare state played a similar role (Kuhnle, 1996; Larsson, 2001; Lundin et al., 2010).

A key reason behind the popularity of central place theory was that Christaller’s framework made it possible to translate economic activities into geometrical figures. Translations, then, are an integral part of scientific knowledge production. Nature is translated into equations, categories, and abstractions that can be analysed in laboratories and printed in journals. They simplify the world and makes it “mobile” (Callon & Latour, 1981, pp. 277–301; Latour, 1986, pp. 264–278, 1987; Law, 1999). Such translations make possible analyses that would otherwise be impossible.

During the post-war period, social scientists increasingly made use of abstract models (Crowther-Heyck, 2015). The proliferation of computers allowed social scientists to analyse large quantities of data without the aid of a large staff. Statistics had always been integral to the social sciences, but the new computational power made possible the development of far more sophisticated statistical models (Hägerstrand, 1967; Edwards, 1996; MacKenzie, 2006). The use of models made it possible to formalize what data to analyse and what methods to use. Hunter Crowther-Heyck (2015) characterizes the most influential models developed by social scientists as “manipulable mobiles”. Like all translations, models can be moved, but they can also be manipulated after they have been moved. They are scalable, which makes it possible to adjust them to local conditions. Crowther-Heyck has devised nine criteria for manipulable models:

[T]hey must be (1) mobile (movable over long distances); (2) unchanged in their meaningful characteristics when so moved; (3) flat; (4) scalable; (5) reproducible; (6) recombinable (as when maps of different sections of a coastline are joined); (7) superimposable (as when population data is added to a topographic map); (8) capable of being merged with written text; and (9) capable of being “merged with geometry” (they convert multiple dimensions and vast scales to two dimensions and convenient sizes for synoptic visual representation) (Crowther-Heyck, 2015, p. 168).

Models are mobile rationalities, and they proliferate because actors find them useful. Where those actors are located determines how the model is implemented. The same model can be used for different ends, but the core rationality remains the same. Central place theory is an example of a highly mobile and adaptable theory. The framework always places the supply of goods and services at the core of the social order. This abstract and consistent theory allowed geographers to cross the boundary between science and politics without undoing it, and it presented policymakers with the opportunity to draw on the authority of science without undermining it with the intrinsic partisanship of politics.

Central Place Theory and Swedish Planning-Geography

In the 1950s, the Swedish state needed methods to realize its welfare ambitions, and the human geographers needed to establish their discipline as a producer of socially beneficial knowledge to justify its status as a social science. Central place theory came to play a vital role in the transformation of Swedish human geography into a planning science and the creation of a mutually strengthening cooperation between researchers, planners, and policymakers.

The reshaping of the academic discipline of human geography was entirely contingent on the political and material conditions associated with the unfolding expansion of the social democratic welfare state. A key tenet of the welfare state as a political project was that all citizens were entitled to the same level of social service regardless of class, occupation, or place of residence. The planning of services such as housing, education, and health, elder and childcare presented a number of spatial challenges. The construction of the welfare state was closely intertwined with the organization of space (Lundquist, 1972; Gustafsson, 1988; Ekström von Essen, 2003). As the number of social services increased, so did the demand for planning expertise. Well before the expansion of the welfare state was initiated, social democratic intellectuals discussed the need for a more extensive form of spatial planning not merely limited to the built environment. The social sciences would complement the expertise of engineers and architects (Rudberg, 1981; Larsson, 2001).

The adaptability and versatility of central place theory were important reasons behind its dissemination and popularity. The theory made it possible to translate society into a form that opened up new aspects of it to political intervention, and it opened up new career paths for geographers. The amphibious nature of geography Kant spoke of became visible as the boundaries between science and policymaking became blurred. For some time, human geography became virtually synonymous with regional planning.

Edgar Kant was one of the theory’s early adopters. Some have suggested that Kant introduced Christaller’s hexagonal world in Sweden (Buttimer, 2005), but although he played an important role, central place theory was not entirely unknown in the country prior to his arrival in 1944. For instance, the Stockholm-based economic geographer William William-Olsson referenced Christaller in his 1937 dissertation (1937, p. 82). Kant’s influence on the department in Lund was nonetheless significant. Young geographers such as Torsten Hägerstrand and Sven Godlund felt validated by his approval of their work (Tammiksaar et al., 2018). In a 1985 interview, Hägerstrand explained how Kant’s original research foci and creative approach to geography made a lasting impression on him and his colleagues:

When I met him [Kant] I had already worked on population analysis, and my work on migration was almost finished before I met him. I think what he showed me was the possibility of summarising data in mathematical formulas. What was really new was his social geography. He never published anything in Swedish, and his Esthonian [sic] publications are not accessible here. But he talked a lot about his studies of Tartu in Esthonia [sic], where he had actually mapped the activity spaces of every social class and even showed pictures of homes of various social classes. This was so impossible for us here in Sweden, because being a geographer was to be out in the field looking at the landscape. To include the inside of people’s homes in the concept of landscape was absolutely new. (Hägerstrand, 1985, p. 12)

In the intellectual environment Kant and Hägerstrand were part of, there was an early interest in the quantitative methods that would dominate the discipline in the coming decades. Hence, it is unsurprising that central place theory was enthusiastically received. However, before the theory could be integrated into their scientific practice, it was necessary to “translate” it to fit the Swedish conditions.

Translating and Diffusing Central Place Theory

The quantitative turn, which central place theory was part of, changed how geographers worked. Hägerstrand described his initial foray into migration studies as an attempt to investigate the relationship between settlement patterns and the physical geography of landscapes. This approach, he explained, was the norm within Swedish geography in the 1940s (Hägerstrand, 1985, pp. 12–13). In one of his early studies, Hägerstrand drew on data on population density and the distance between the Swedish towns that migrants moved to and from to calculate the level of migration intensity (Hägerstrand, 1947). The significance of this particular study was that he primarily used demographic data to simulate the migration patterns. In another early study, he used hexagon patterns to study the diffusion of automobility in Sweden (Hägerstrand, 1951). While he did not explicitly cite any of Christaller’s works in this study, his analytical framework clearly appears to have been inspired by central place theory. These studies reflected the broader shift happening in geography at the time towards quantitative approaches, a shift that the use of central place theory was very much a part of.

Central place theory played a fairly small role in Hägerstrand’s early studies of migration. In these studies, he attempted to create abstract models that simulated social processes, but his ambitions were larger than the confines of the theory would allow. In his dissertation, the study that gave him international recognition, Hägerstrand used an assortment of quantitative data to simulate the diffusion of technical innovations in rural Sweden (Hägerstrand, 1953). This was a necessary step towards abstraction for making possible more elaborate simulations and models. The dissertation also marked a step away from the regional approach to geography the earlier generation of geographers had been concerned with.

The person who would more fully translate central place theory to fit Swedish conditions was Hägerstrand’s long-term collaborator Sven Godlund. In his dissertation, Godlund (1954) developed a central place index for towns in southern Sweden on the basis of his analyses of bus commuting patterns (Fig. 3.2). Christaller had initially devised a large number of criteria for calculating the hierarchy of central places, not all of which were related to retail trade. For Godlund’s purposes, however, population data, data on the number of retail employees, and the number of passengers on each bus line was sufficient to determine the hierarchy of towns (Godlund, 1954, pp. 60–69). In line with Christaller’s ideas, the basic assumption was that towns should be studied by examining their surroundings. The analytical model Godlund developed was abstract but less complex in comparison to Christaller’s original version.

Fig. 3.2
A map of Sweden developed a central place index for towns in southern Sweden on the basis of his analyses of bus commuting patterns.

Central place theory translated to Swedish conditions. This map depicts the theoretical surrounding areas in southern Sweden as calculated using Godlund’s centrality index. (Source: Godlund (1954, p. 333))

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In the work of Godlund and Hägerstrand, social interactions were construed as the primary explanation for the localization and importance of towns. Spatial phenomena were examined independently from their topographical circumstances. Godlund’s centrality index was less complex than Hägerstrand’s simulations, but they both developed and worked with abstract models of society. Notably, the influence of central place theory was in part a product of its simplicity: the index computed by Godlund was simple enough to be mastered by others than professional researchers. On the whole, the theory was relatively simple to use, even though more complex simulations of the kind developed by geographers like Hägerstrand required combining the theory with other models. Nevertheless, familiarity with central place theory made such models more accessible.

The usefulness of central place theory, specifically Godlund’s centrality index, was more critical for the credibility of human geography as a planning science than Hägerstrand’s sophisticated and complex simulations. In comparison to Hägerstrand, who became a professor at the department in Lund in 1957, Godlund’s academic career was less straightforward. In 1962, he became the first professor of human geography at the University of Gothenburg, but for the better part of the 1950s, he had to find employment outside of academia. Since his early research had primarily been concerned with transportation issues, he was hired as an expert in a public study on the reorganization of the Swedish road network. The car had become the dominant mode of transportation, and the infrastructure had to be expanded and restructured accordingly (Blomkvist, 2001, pp. 176–200; Lundin, 2008). In this study (Statens offentliga utredningar, 1958), which culminated in one of the hitherto largest infrastructure investments in Sweden, Godlund used his expertise to devise where the road network should be expanded. As such, central place theory played a key role in transforming Sweden into an automobility-oriented society.

Godlund and Hägerstrand, who operated at opposite ends of the applied-abstract spectrum, remained lifelong friends and collaborators. After Godlund left Lund, he used his position to involve Hägerstrand’s students in his work as a planner, as their private correspondence makes evident (Godlund, 1955a, 1955b, 1955c; Hägerstrand, 1955). Several students who contributed to Godlund’s planning efforts used the data they had gathered to write graduate theses with Hägerstrand as their supervisor (Godlund, 1955d, 1955e). Many of these students eventually became full-time planners (Wikman, 2019, 151–157).

Central Places and Municipal Reforms

The shift towards planning had significant implications for Swedish human geography. Geography departments came to have a distinct function: to train planners. Several members of the young discipline saw and seized the opportunity to establish human geography departments as producers of “useful” knowledge. Geographers working in the vein of Godlund and Hägerstrand gained influence, while those who worked in the tradition of regional geography were increasingly marginalized. When the boundaries of the discipline were redrawn, the regional approach did not disappear completely, but it was no longer located at the core of the cultural map of human geography. The centre of the discipline shifted towards research topics that revolved around the planning needs of the state (Buttimer & Mels, 2006, pp. 63–82; Wikman, 2019, pp. 174–176).

The work and career path of Bengt Jacobson, one of Hägerstrand’s students, offers a good example of how the new geographers trained in the use of Christaller’s theory contributed to planning. Using Godlund’s centrality index, Jacobson developed proposals for delineating rural school precincts (Jacobson, 1956, 1958). His studies were not particularly original, but they well demonstrate how central place theory came to be used for planning purposes. Jacobson’s professional path was also indicative of what was to come. He did not make an academic career but became a civil servant in the Ministry of Education and Research. Early in his career as a bureaucrat, he represented the Ministry in the processes that preceded the pivotal municipal reform initiated in 1962 (Jacobson, 1988, 1992).

By the late 1950s, geographers were still trying to become a part of the larger planning milieu. The involvement of academic geographers in the 1962 municipal reform was vital for this ambition. This major reform was intended to restructure the administrative geography created by a municipal reform carried out a decade earlier. Despite being preceded by thorough and detailed studies, the population in many municipalities had proved too small to create a tax base large enough to fund the expanding social services local governments were legally required to provide. The goal of the reform initiated in 1962 was to create a framework for inter-municipal cooperation, so-called municipal blocks. Municipalities within a block were initially encouraged to voluntarily merge into a single municipality, yet these mergers were soon made mandatory (Wångmar, 2003, 2013).

Through the municipal reform of 1962, Sweden’s administrative geography was reorganized in line with the assumptions of central place theory. Appointed as an expert by the committee tasked with carrying out the reform, Godlund was essentially given free rein to develop the principles for how the new municipalities should be delineated. He was also granted the opportunity to hire his own assistants, several of whom had studied under Hägerstrand. The process was purposefully structured so as to give the experts involved significant influence and power. Parliamentary support for reorganizing the municipalities had been secured during the first round of reforms in the late 1940s. Hence, the experts could act autonomously and with a strong mandate. It was an ideal situation for social scientists keen to traverse the boundaries between science and politics without undoing them. While politicians had formulated the goals of the reform, the experts could more or less freely decide how to achieve them (Wikman, 2019, pp. 192–195).

Around the same time, the Swedish education system was also the subject of major reforms. The mandatory public school was extended to 9 years and the syllabus was revised to include more science education. As a result, schools needed dedicated science classrooms. For financial reasons, it was argued that the schools would thus have to be larger in size. The general principle was that no district should include students from more than one municipality, and that no pupil should have to commute more than 40 minutes to their school (Wikman, 2019, pp. 215–223). Accordingly, the planning problem that had to be solved was to create school districts large enough to have a substantial number of students but small enough to ensure that the commutes would not be too long. These kinds of challenges were precisely the ones for which Godlund had designed his index. Neither Godlund nor any other academic geographers were directly involved in this process, but civil servants in the public administration made use of the tool he had developed to restructure the school districts (Jacobson, 1988, 1992).

As Christaller had argued, hospitals, schools, and other services determine where a town is located in the central place hierarchy. By deciding where such services were to be located, the Swedish state could shape and direct the development of central places. Through regional planning practices informed by Godlund’s index, central place theory thus played a decisive role in the organization of the spatial order of the Swedish welfare state.

Central place theory translated economic activity into geometrical figures, and when it was used to implement political reforms, it transformed society. As a by-product, the discipline of human geography became largely defined by its focus on planning. The strong position human geography occupied around this time is attested to by how no other discipline received more funding from the social science research council during the early 1970s (Pred, 1974, p. 3). The cultural space of regional planning between science and politics allowed geographers to shape social relations without becoming political actors. For their part, policymakers were able to draw on geographical expertise and theory to make political issues into technical issues. Citizens could contest the political decisions to redraw municipal boundaries, but it was far more difficult for members of the general public to challenge the authority of experts and scientific principles such as central place theory. By making the political issue of how municipal borders should be drawn into a scientific question of the hierarchy between central places, the issue was moved into the cultural space of spatial planning and placed under the authority of experts.

Escaping Central Place Theory

By the early 1970s, central place theory reached its zenith in Swedish human geography. In the following decades, the theory gradually became far less influential. Two key reasons explain its declining popularity. First, a number of geographers argued that it constrained the development of human geography as an academic subject, and that the involvement of geographers in regional planning had largely failed to create a more just society. Second, the theory was closely tied to the particular historical moment when the welfare state was rapidly expanded. When the politics and material conditions which made it useful as a planning tool eventually fundamentally changed, so did its status and utility.

Beginning in the early 1970s, a number of geographers levelled strong criticism against the shortcomings of positivist approaches and how the involvement of geographers in regional planning had impacted Swedish society (Gullberg & Lindström, 1979; Alvstam et al., 1979; Mels, 2012). One of the most vocal critics was Gunnar Olsson, who had made significant contributions to the development of quantitative geography (see for example Olsson, 1965; Olsson & Persson, 1964). In the early 1970s, Olsson, who had left Sweden for the University of Michigan in 1966, began to feel increasingly uneasy about the involvement of geographers in the planning of the welfare state and the dominance of positivism more broadly (Olsson, 1974, 1980; Gren, 2012). Swedish regional planning, he suggested, had largely failed to achieve its laudable goal “to abolish the spatial element of social and economic inequality” (Olsson, 1974, p. 19). The theories and models geographers had relied on were inadequate and had mainly reproduced the shortcomings of the societies they had ventured to improve:

In retrospect, it appears that the majority of spatial analysts – among whom I certainly include myself – have confined ourselves so thoroughly within our categorial frameworks, within our particular mathematical language, and within our artifacts that we thereby have helped to perpetuate the functional inequalities of the past. In fact what we seem not to have realized is that in order to acquire a new world, we must at the same time acquire a new analytical language, less dogmatic than the old, but no less abstract and no less difficult. (Olsson, 1974, p. 19)

Writing a decade later, Hägerstrand (1983, p. 253) similarly critically reflected on the legacy of his involvement in planning. “In many ways”, he wrote, “present-day critics are right when they say that we tried to sweep up after the moves of a capitalistic industry involved in international competition. At that time, however, this seemed to be the sensible thing to do.”

In part, these critiques should be understood in relation to the changes taking place in the discipline around the same time in Anglo-American geography, where humanistic and radical geographers criticized and sought to transcend the dominance of positivist approaches (Harvey, 1972; Barnes & Sheppard, 2019). Importantly, however, quantitative geography never reached the same hegemonic status in Sweden or the other Nordic countries as it did in the United States (Öhman, 1994, pp. 90–92; Helmfrid, 2004, pp. 7–8). The criticism voiced by people like Hägerstrand and Olsson must be understood in relation to the perceived failures of spatial planning and how the focus on planning constrained the development of human geography as an academic subject. In an insightful piece on the state of Swedish geography by the early 1990s, Jan Öhman (1994) noted that there had long been scant interest in exploring and contributing to theoretical questions and debates beyond the world of applied research (see also Gren, 2005; Simonsen & Öhman, 2003).

Following his involvement in planning, Hägerstrand shifted his attention towards developing the novel concept of time geography. In brief, he sought to create a theoretical framework and notational apparatus for grappling with the complex relationship between time and space, and the ways in which social structures and the lives of individuals are shaped by this relationship. Hägerstrand’s work on time geography cemented his international reputation, and during his turn towards these more experimental and philosophical approaches, he explicitly distanced himself from the hexagonal world of central place theory (e.g. Hägerstrand, 1970, 1977). Hägerstrand’s later career path, then, clearly reflects how moving away from the limits of central place theory and applied planning research opened new possibilities for theoretical inquiries.

Central place theory played an important role in transforming Swedish human geography from a largely descriptive practice into a modern social science. Ultimately, however, it could not be used to develop more advanced and philosophical theories and approaches to geography. This is not the place for an in-depth review of the development of human geography in Sweden in the decades after the interest in central place theory began to decline. Yet as Öhman (1994, pp. 91–92) also noted, the dissertations presented at Swedish geography departments from the late 1970s up until the early 1990s demonstrate how there was an increasing interest to engage with theoretical questions and issues which had been largely neglected during the era of planning-geography. As the other chapters in this book reflect, this trend has continued insofar as geographers interact with and contribute to a wide range of theoretical currents and debates (see also e.g. Simonsen & Öhman, 2003; Sircar, 2019). Undoubtedly, the development of more nuanced and far more illuminating understandings of socio-spatial relations was predicated on abandoning the dependence on reductive theories such as that of Christaller.

Central place theory lives on in how it continues to shape Swedish society: the municipal structure remains unchanged for the most part, and many of the schools and hospitals planned in accordance with its principles are still in use. By contrast, the story is rather different within the world of research and higher education. Many students who take an introductory geography course are presented with an image of the iconic hexagonal pattern and a brief overview of how Christaller’s ideas have influenced spatial planning in Sweden and beyond (his involvement in the Nazi state is unfortunately rarely mentioned). However, the theory plays a fairly marginal role in the research conducted by human geographers.

In the summer of 2018, a major debate unfolded in the opinion pages of the daily Svenska Dagbladet on the role and future of Swedish human geography. Among other things, the debate revolved around the policy relevance of the subject and the extent to which geographers can and should cater to the planning needs of the state. Jan Amcoff and Thomas Niedomysl (2018) argued that it was a pity that most geographers no longer conduct the kind of research that would make them attractive as experts on regional planning. Specifically, they contrasted the contemporary conditions to how Swedish geographers were once heavily involved in spatial planning, taking as one of their examples how central place theory had been used to restructure the country’s administrative geography.

This critique, however, fails to consider how the declining involvement of geographers in planning must be understood in relation to the gradual unwinding of the welfare state over the last few decades (Enlund, 2020; Schierup & Ålund, 2011; Christophers, 2013). Unfortunately, we cannot discuss these developments here at any length, yet it suffices to say that the main reason for why there is no longer much demand for analyses of the kind geographers like Godlund were tasked with providing is hardly that geographers are no longer primarily concerned with central place theory or applied research. Rather, what has changed is how and to what extent the state asks for this kind of expertise.

In this regard, one of the arguments presented by Trevor Barnes (2004) in his study of the rise and fall of regional science in the United States is illuminating. Barnes observes that regional science emerged in tandem with the post-war economic boom in the decades after World War II, and that one of the reasons for why the discipline fell apart was that these material conditions eventually changed. A similar analysis, then, holds true also for the use and status of central place theory in Sweden. Planning-geography was fundamentally a product of the rapidly expanding welfare state. Similarly to how the cold war informed the growth and development of social science in the United States, the welfare state thoroughly shaped the development and expansion of human geography in Sweden. Human geographers successfully secured funding made available as a result of the expansion of the welfare state, yet the demand for the particular type of expertise they offered gradually declined when the welfare state was no longer being expanded.

Conclusion

Through their adaptation and development of central place theory, Swedish geographers were able to position themselves as authorities on spatial planning. Since Christaller’s framework reduces socio-spatial relations to market relationships the theory only allowed for abstract and highly simplified models and representations of socio-spatial relations, yet its high level of abstraction made it flexible, mobile, and useful for the planning needs of the expanding welfare state. By translating central place theory to Swedish conditions, the geographers made it possible to systematically examine and intervene in social processes in new ways. Through these translations, the theory shaped the material and administrative infrastructure of the Swedish welfare state. In turn, human geographers gained access to significant funding and became regarded as experts and producers of socially useful knowledge.

Critically, central place theory allowed geographers to cross the boundary between science and politics without erasing it. It played a key role in the creation of a space on the cultural map where social scientists could engage in political reform work without losing their credibility as scientists. At the same time, policymakers could draw on the authority of science to justify their decisions. A space was created where sticky questions such as where schools or hospitals should be located could be delegated to experts who employed abstract models to determine their purportedly optimal localization. However, things changed when the expansive phase of the welfare state drew towards its end. Methods for localizing hospitals were less useful when fewer new hospitals were being built. The intimate relationship between planning and the subject of human geography also became a subject of criticism from academic geographers. The cultural space that had functioned as a neutral zone between science and politics gradually threatened the autonomy of the discipline.

The development of more complex and philosophical theories and approaches to geography clearly reflected a desire to move away from the confines of central place theory. The simplified understanding of socio-spatial relations the theory was based on and reproduced did not allow for the pursuit of more intricate and multifaceted analyses. To a certain extent, it is understandable why some would like to see human geography regain the position the discipline occupied during the heydays of planning-geography. Yet as we have argued in this chapter, the political and material conditions which gave it this status are no longer there. What is more, the very notion that the discipline would have continued to be inhibited by the confines of central place theory and cognate simplistic theories is frankly terrifying.

The relationship between social science and politics is always tense, given that scientific influence commonly turns into political influence. The development trajectory of Swedish planning-geography illustrates the Janus face of applied social science. The boundaries between social science and politics are constantly redrawn. Spaces on the cultural map where social scientists can shape the development of society can quickly become spaces where political concerns structure and constrain what they can do.