The central place study of Edgar Kant and its significance in the history of contemporary geography

Abstract

An outline of the geographical work of Edgar Kant, who contributed to the formation of the Lund School of Geography, has been discussed by Buttimer (1987, 1994, 2000) and Kurs (1992). Alternatively, this paper considers his central place study of Estonia in the 1930s (Kant 1935), focusing on its characteristics, scientific influence, and application, which has not yet been examined in detail.

In Kant (1935), central places are hierarchically classified into five levels, using a centrality index of workers in the secondary and tertiary industries representing the nonfarm population. The hinterlands of the main central places are approximately demarcated on the basis of (theoretical) agricultural marketing regions (Fig. 3) delimited by Maide (1931), because the marketing region of Tartu seems to have been roughly equivalent to its nearby hinterland which Kant actually surveyed.

Macroscopically, the central place distribution in prewar Estonia was in harmony with population density, which was closely related to agricultural productivity reflecting the topographical conditions of the lowlands and the highlands. The country was covered by the two hinterlands of Tallinn and Tartu, the most highly ranked central places (Fig. 2). It is suggested that both subsystems of the central places of Narva and Kressarre, situated outside of the hinterlands of Tallinn and Tartu, could independently exist under the continuing influence of the framework of the regional administrative system of the former Russian Empire.

The central place study of Kant is characterized by a methodology to analyze the central place distribution in terms of a concentric structure: mainly lower-ranked central places surround the middle- and higher-ranked ones; outside the ring-shaped distribution of lowerranked ones are mainly middle-ranked central places that are circularly located around the higher-ranked ones. The former distribution area is approximately equivalent to the hinterland of the middle-ranked central places, the latter, that of higher-ranked ones.

This methodology confirmed the above concentric structure in the central place distribution of Estonia, as well as revealing the fact that a portion of the hexagonal locational pattern of the central places was observed in the area covering the hinterlands of Tartu, Viljandi, Valga, and Võru. The fundamental structure of central place distribution was formed after the mid-1800s, when Estonia belonged to the Russian Empire. Kant’s understanding that traffic towns and railway-station settlements would grow after the subsequent openings of railways, and would therefore influence the concentric structure of central place distribution, seems to be based on his expectation that a central place system chiefly formed according to the market principle would be gradually transformed by the traffic principle.

In terms of “central place studies”, Kant (1935) adding the industrial population to the centrality index may seem inadequate, even if there still existed in Estonia many handicrafts, where manufacturing and selling were undifferentiated and their products were sold in local markets. Kant (1935) was influenced by Bobek (1927) prompting the functional turn of urban geography. However, Kant made good use of central place theory proposed by Christaller (1933) as an effective framework to deal with the system of urban settlements, which is clear if Kant’s work (1935) is compared with the explanation on Estonian towns developed in his earlier paper (Kant 1932: 471-479), published in Annales de Géographie, where only the characteristics of the major towns are described without any explanation of their hinterlands. However, by introducing the framework of central place theory, it became possible to consider the entire Estonian urban settlements as a well-organized system.