Waldo Tobler’s proposed the First Law of Geography in 1970: “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” This law has maintained importance over the past 50+ years despite major updates to spatial modeling and geography. It introduced the importance of location, and assumes a distance decay or cost path function, in other words, moving over space requires expenditure of energy. In the context of a transportation model, for example, this would mean that a person would be less likely to travel to a store that is further away than a store that is closer. This basic concept can be applied to water, air, fire, noise, and many other phenomenon.
Tobler’s law is at the heart of spatial autocorrelation analysis. This is important in network analysis and geospatial modeling, where relationships are often based on spatial configuration, access, and proximity. While the simplest examples utilize euclidean space, nearness is not required to be a function of Euclidean space. While two features may be adjacent to one another, they may not be considered ‘near’ in network space. In their paper modeling the effects of sea level rise and storm surge on coastal infrastructure and first-responder accessibility to households in the San Francisco Bay region, Biging and Radke (2012) extent the concept of ‘nearness’ to include both space and time. They find that the impact of inundation due to rising sea levels and extreme storms ‘will be felt far beyond the local neighborhoods that are flooded’ and that ‘potential inundation of [certain major roads] has the potential to disrupt traffic flow across the entire region’. Certain features such as levees and walls also disrupt flow of water and can result of variable spatial connectivity of the flooding.
Tobler’s first law continues to be a guiding principle of geographic research. We continue to analyze and reassess what counts as ‘near’ in geographical analysis, and how near and distance things interact.
