Walter Christaller’s research on regional and rural development planning during World War II

Abstract

The goals of this study were to describe and evaluate Christaller's research on regional and rural planning during World War II. His research was analyzed by identifying ideas from his pre-war studies that were basic to his war research, by piecing together theoretical perspectives from sources from 1940-1945, and by identifying links between those studies and his research on central places. It was shown that Christaller's research contributed to plans facilitating German Lebensraum policy and the objectives of Himmler's Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom, that he built the conceptual and theoretical frameworks used in his war research on his earlier theories of central places, administrative regions, and rural settlement change, that he used his theoretical ideas to confront basic problems in planning and human geography, and that he offered innovative solutions including (1) generalization of his original theory by the addition of a mixed hierarchical principle, (2) development of normative systems of urban-centered administrative-planning regions both for the German Empire and in more detail for western Poland, (3) development of a model of metropolitan regions, and (4) development of a settlement system based theory of rural development.