Central Place Theory After 1945 and the Production of Scientific Innocence

Abstract

Central place theory is presented as an abstract model of settlement hierarchy and spatial distribution. This paper examines its development within the National Socialist project of territorial reconstruction and its application in Walter Christaller’s planning of conquered Eastern territories. Working in the Planning and Soil Department connected to Himmler’s Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, Christaller designed settlement and administrative systems for territories undergoing forced demographic transformation.

The paper does not claim that central place theory caused the Holocaust or explains National Socialist violence. It examines how spatial expertise operated within a project connecting deportation, dispossession, extermination, forced displacement, and German settlement. Demographic clearance created the politically imagined “empty” space upon which a settlement hierarchy could be imposed.

The analysis then considers the theory’s post-war reconstruction. During geography’s quantitative revolution, Christaller was reduced to hexagons, hierarchies, and market principles, while the political conditions of the theory’s production and application disappeared from its scientific meaning. Christaller’s autobiographical origin story reinforced this separation. The paper interprets this transformation through scientific careerism and disciplinary memory: not as forgetting, but as the production of scientific innocence around a politically situated intellectual project.