Tobler’s First Law and Spatial Analysis

‘‘ I invoke the first law of geography: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’’ (Tobler 1970). How could a sentence justifying heuristic calculations in a crude urban growth simulation generate an icon now known as Tobler’s First Law (TFL)? Why has this law resonated so strongly in geography? Waldo Tobler could invoke a first law of geography since the proposition that near things are more related seemed reasonable in 1970. It is enduring since near and related are useful concepts at the core of spatial analysis and modeling. And in 2004 and beyond, TFL is still useful since the rise of geographic information science and technologies allow greater sophistication when measuring and analyzing these concepts. This is ironic considering that Tobler apparently invoked the law in part to apologize for the slow computers at that time. I am going to sidestep the issue of whether TFL is in fact a law by noting that science accepts the concept of empirical laws, or compact descriptions of patterns and regularities. These are not required to be immutable truths (Casti 1990; Swartz 2001). We certainly have ample evidence to support TFL: you may have noticed on the way to work this morning that the world is orderly with respect to space. Scientific laws are also not required to be causal, for example, Newton’s Law of Gravity is not an explanation. Although not causal, TFL is consistent with an elegant process argument: overcoming space requires expenditure of energy and resources, something that nature and humans try to minimize (although not exclusively, of course). I accept TFL as reasonable regularity that generally holds true. The issues I am going to examine are the central roles of ‘‘near’’ and ‘‘related’’ to spatial analysis and the increasing levels of sophistication that we can achieve when measuring and analyzing these concepts. I also suggest that relations among near entities do not imply a simple, sterile geography; complex geographic processes and structures can emerge from local interactions. Indeed, the sensitivity of geographic and other phenomena to local interactions implies that we should carefully measure and analyze relations among near things.