Reconsidering the legacy of urban public facility location theory in human geography

Abstract

In 1968, Michael Teitz initiated a new locational theory, focusing on how best to locate urban public facilities given the need to balance efficiency and equity. This locational problematic would evolve into a coherent set of geographical concepts steeped in normative, neoclassical and quantitative assumptions. Building on Teitz's original formulations, quantitative geographers and regional scientists focused on operationalizing efficiency and equity concerns according to distance, pattern, accessibility, impacts and externalities. The legacy of these concepts in human geography, however, has not been systematically traced. While both reflecting and bolstering wider stances in welfare, urban and behavioral geography during the quantitative era, the legacy of urban public facility theory in the postquantitative era is decidedly uneven. On the one hand, the legacy was effectively refuted by situating location theory within a much broader political, economic and social matrix. Adopting a more conflictual framework, geographers shifted the focus of locational theory to larger questions of how costs and benefits are spatially distributed in urban society. On the other hand, the legacy was sustained by retaining the normative interest in balancing equity with efficiency within a model-building paradigm, while jettisoning the reliance on neoclassical economics and universalistic assumptions for more nuanced, socially embedded accounts. In this sense, the legacy of urban public facility location theory emerges as a nested sequence of normative models that grew increasingly sophisticated, inclusive and contextualized over time. The rise of the nonprofit and privatized sectors, however, threatens to erode the existence of a distinctly public facility location theory.