Top Highlights

• The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS) Classics provides a list of classic readings that contribute to spatial thinking in the social sciences.
• geostatistics generally measures spatial dependence by distance-based functions while areal data analysis often uses neighborhood structures.
• Tobler’s (1970) first law of geography states that everything is related to everything else, but nearer things more so.
• population growth forces spread (spillover) into surrounding areas (Hudson, 1972), which implies that population growth is spatially dependent.
• The central place theory puts population in a hierarchy of urban places, where the movement of populations, firms, and goods is determined by the associated costs and city sizes