Agglomeration, bid-rent, von Thünen rings, gravity, central places, Schelling segregation, Weber's location triangle and the rank-size rule, each explained with one picture.
The video builds the intuition; sources and limits are set out in the article. English- and Japanese-captioned versions of the vertical film are still on the to-do list.
The film strings eight models into one continuous overview, one mechanism per chapter:
- Agglomeration economies: firms and people that cluster share suppliers, labour pools and knowledge, so average costs fall.
- Bid-rent curves: closer to the centre, commuting costs less and people bid more for land, so rent falls with distance.
- Von Thünen rings: crops with different transport costs sort into rings by their return per unit of land.
- The gravity model: trade between two places rises with their sizes and falls with distance.
- Central place theory: services differ in demand threshold and range, so cities form a size hierarchy.
- Schelling’s segregation model: even when everyone wants only some neighbours like themselves, the whole can separate sharply.
- Weber’s location triangle: between material sources and the market, a plant sits where total transport cost is lowest.
- The rank-size rule: a country’s city sizes are often roughly inversely proportional to their rank.
Each model rests on assumptions; the film shows only the mechanism with one picture, and the derivations and limits belong to dedicated records. Records in this series on end-point location, Hotelling competition and lock-in expand several of these chapters.
Japanese version
The same film with Japanese captions.
Sources: Fujita, Krugman and Venables (1999); McCann (2001); classic sources per chapter, including von Thünen (1826), Weber (1909), Christaller (1933), Schelling (1971) and Alonso (1964).