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Concept
Friction of distance
Résumé
Friction of distance is a core principle of Geography that states that movement incurs some form of cost, in the form of physical effort, energy, time, and/or the expenditure of other resources, and that these costs are proportional to the distance traveled. This cost is thus a resistance against movement, analogous (but not directly related) to the effect of friction against movement in classical mechanics. The subsequent preference for minimizing distance and its cost underlies a vast array of geographic patterns from economic agglomeration to wildlife migration, as well as many of the theories and techniques of spatial analysis, such as Tobler's first law of geography, network routing, and cost distance analysis. To a large degree, friction of distance is the primary reason why geography is relevant to many aspects of the world, although its importance (and perhaps the importance of geography) has been decreasing with the development of transportation and communication technologies.
It is not known who first coined the term "friction of distance," but the effect of distance-based costs on geographic activity and geographic patterns has been a core element of academic geography since its initial rise in the 19th Century. von Thünen's isolated state model of exurban land use (1826), possibly the earliest geographic theory, directly incorporated the cost of transportation of different agricultural products as one of the determinants for how far from a town each type of goods could be produced profitably. The industrial location theory of Alfred Weber (1909) and the central place theory of Walter Christaller (1933) were also basically optimizations of space to minimize travel costs.
By the 1920s, social scientists began to incorporate principles of physics (more precisely, some of its mathematical formalizations), such as gravity, specifically the inverse square law found in Newton's law of universal gravitation.
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