Tobler's First Law of Geography: A Big Idea for a Small World?

As one of 13 geographers elected into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences after World War II, Waldo Tobler’s contributions to geography are well known. The late Peter Gould (1979) even remarked that ‘‘an innocent ignorance of Tobler’s work now constitutes a constraint on the geographic imagination. That is to say, if a graduate student is not aware of certain pieces of Tobler’s research, [his]/her own research abilities are jeopardized because [he]/she cannot gain a new and crucial perspective’’ (p. 147). Gould made these remarks while discussing Tobler’s contributions to cartography. Tobler’s influence has obviously crossed the boundaries of cartography, as evidenced by his groundbreaking work in fields as diverse as spatial analysis, migration studies, spatial interaction modeling, and geographic information science (GIScience). The most ambitious of all, perhaps, was his attempt to define the first law of geography. Based upon a paper, ‘‘A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region,’’ presented in a 1969 meeting organized by the Commission on Quantitative Methods of the International Geographical Union (IGU) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tobler (1970) later published a paper with the same title in Economic Geography. In this paper, Tobler invoked the first law of geography for the first time: ‘‘everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.’’ This charming, deceptively simple statement later became

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