Abstract
It is now commonplace to recognise that there are many ‘quantitative geographies’. Many of us are prisoners of particular skills. This is useful for the field as a whole since it at least guarantees that a wide range of methods is applied in any particular context; it is not necessarily an efficient way of discovering the most effective methods but the test of time, in the long run, sorts this out.
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Notes and References
G.J. Chapman, Human and Environmental System (London: Academic Press, 1977).
I try to sketch this argument in A.G. Wilson, Geography and the Environment: Systems Analytical Methods (Chichester: John Wiley, 1981). Here, and in most of the subsequent discussion, I cite my own work or that of Leeds’ colleagues. This is for economy only, and because the approach is autobiographical. The bibliographies in the works cited contain a much wider range of references, and should provide a broader access to the literature.
W. Weaver, ‘A quarter century in the natural sciences’, Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation, New York (1958) pp. 7–122.
I.S. Lowry, A Model of Metropolis (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1964).
R.C. Tolman, The Principles of Statistical Mechanics (Oxford University Press, 1938).
A.G. Wilson, Entropy in Urban and Regional Modelling (London: Pion, 1970).
A.G. Wilson, ‘A family of spatial interaction models’, Environment and Planning, vol. 3 (1971) pp. 1–32.
S. Evans, ‘A relationship between the gravity model for trip distribution and the transportation problem in linear programming’, Transportation Research, vol. 7 (1973) pp. 39–61.
A.G. Wilson and M. Senior, ‘Some relationships between entropy maximising models, mathematical programming models and their duals’, Journal of Regional Science, vol. 14 (1974) pp. 207–15.
P.H. Rees and A.G. Wilson, Spatial Population Analysis (London: Edward Arnold, 1976).
A.G. Wilson, P.H. Rees and C.M. Leigh (eds), Models of Cities and Regions (Chichester: John Wiley, 1977).
The structure of this parallels my earlier attempt to chart the urban and regional modelling field, in A.G. Wilson, Urban and Regional Models in Geography and Planning (Chichester: John Wiley, 1974).
The original shopping model structural equilibrium problem is described in J.D. Coelho and A.G. Wilson, ‘The optimum size and location of shopping centres’, Regional Studies, vol. 10 (1976) pp. 413–21;
the embedding theorem is in J.D. Coelho, H.C.W.L. Williams and A.G. Wilson, ‘Entropy maximising submodels within overall mathematical programming frameworks: a correction’, Geographical Analysis, vol. 10 (1978) pp. 195–210.
This was part of a much broader set of concerns with the role of optimisation methods in urban and regional modelling, which are collected together in A.G. Wilson, J.D. Coelho, S.M. Macgill and H.C.W.L. Williams, Optimisation in Locational and Transport Analysis (Chichester: John Wiley, 1981).
J. Forrester, Urban Dynamics (MIT Press, 1969).
R. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (MIT Press, 1973).
B. Harris and A.G. Wilson, ‘Equilibrium values and dynamics of attractiveness terms in production-constrained spatial-interaction models’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 10 (1978) pp. 371–88.
R.M. May, Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems (Princeton University Press, 1973).
Much of my own work on different aspects of dynamics, including new approaches to central place theory, is described in A.G. Wilson, Catastrophe Theory and Bifurcation: Applications to Urban and Regional Systems (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
C.S. Holling, Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems, IIASA Research Report (1973).
P. Hall, Urban and Regional Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
D. Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973).
A.J. Scott, The Urban Land Nexus and the State (London: Pion, 1980).
R. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet, 1969); and Marxism and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1977).
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© 1983 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Wilson, A.G. (1983). One Man’s Quantitative Geography: Frameworks, Evaluations, Uses and Prospects. In: Billinge, M., Gregory, D., Martin, R. (eds) Recollections of a Revolution. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17416-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17416-4_11
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