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Regional science

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Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned about analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to, behavioral modeling of location, transportation, and migration decisions, land use and urban development, inter-industry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists. For more material on the foci of regional science, see, for example, the Web Book of Regional Science [1]

Origins

Regional science was founded in the late 1940s when some economists began to become dissatisfied with the low level of regional economic analysis and felt an urge to upgrade it. But even in this early era, the founders of regional science expected to catch the interest of people from a wide variety of disciplines. Regional science's formal roots date to the aggressive campaigns by Walter Isard and his supporters to promote the "objective" and "scientific" analysis of settlement, industrial location, and urban development. Isard targeted key universities and campaigned tirelessly. Accordingly, the Regional Science Association was founded in 1954, when the core group of scholars and practitioners held its first meetings independent from those initially held as sessions of the annual meetings of the American Economics Association.[1] Now called the Regional Science Association International, it maintains subnational and international associations, journals, and a conference circuit (notably in North America, continental Europe, Japan, and Korea). Membership in the RSAI continues to grow.

Seminal Publications

Topically speaking, regional science took off in the wake of Walter Christaller's book Die Zentralen Orte in Sűddeutschland (published in 1933), soon followed by Edgar M. Hoover's Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industry (1938) and The Location of Economic Activity (1948). Other important early publications include: Edward H. Chamberlin's (1950)The Theory of Monopolistic Competition ; François Perroux's Economic Spaces: Theory and Application (1950); Torsten Hägerstrand's (1953) Innovationsförloppet ur Korologisk Synpunkt; Edgar S. Dunn's (1954)The Location of Agricultural Production ; August Lösch's (1954)The Economics of Location ; Martin J. Beckmann, C.B McGuire, and Clifford B. Winston's (1956) Studies in the Economics of Transportation; Melvin L. Greenhut's (1956) Plant Location in Theory and Practice; Gunnar Myrdal's (1957)Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions; Albert O. Hirschman's (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development; and Claude Ponsard's (1958)Histoire des Théorie Économique Spatiales. Nonetheless, Walter Isard's first book in 1956, Location and Space Economy, apparently captured the imagination of many, and his third, Methods of Regional Analysis, published in 1960, only sealed his position as the father of the field.

As is typically the case, the above works were performed on the shoulders of giants. Much of this predecessor work is documented well in Claude Ponsard's book mentioned in the paragraph above. [2]

Core Journals

If an academic discipline is identified by its journals, then technically regional science began in 1955 with the publication of the first volume of the Papers and Proceedings, Regional Science Association (now Papers in Regional Science published by Springer Verlag). In 1958, the Journal of Regional Science followed.

Academic Programs

Walter Isard's efforts culminated in the creation of a few academic departments and several university-wide programs in regional science. At Walter Isard's suggestion, the University of Pennsylvania started the Regional Science Department in 1956. It featured as its first graduate William Alonso and was looked upon by many to be the international academic leader for the field. The core curricumlum of this department was microeconomics, input-output analysis, location theory, and statistics. Faculty also taught courses in mathematical programming, transportation economics, labor economics, energy and ecological policy modeling, spatial statistics, spatial interaction theory and models, benefit/cost analysis, urban and regional analysis, and economic development theory, among others. But the department's unusual multidisciplinary orientation undoubtedly encouraged its demise, and it lost its department status in 1993.[3]

Public Policy Impact

Part of the movement was, and continues to be, associated with political and economic realities of the role of the local community. By targeting federal resources to specific geographic areas the Kennedy administration realized that political favors could be bought. This is also evident in Europe and other geographic areas were economic areas do not coincide with political boundaries. In the more current era of devolution knowledge about “local solutions to local problems” has driven much of the interest in regional science. In the spirit of Walter Isard, regional science is truly interdisciplinary and is not limited to geographers, economists, political scientists, or sociologists.

Developments after 1980

Regional Science has enjoyed mixed fortunes since the 1980s. While it has gained a larger following among economists and public policy practitioners, the discipline has fallen out of favor among more radical and Post-Modernist geographers.

New Economic Geography

In 1991, Paul Krugman, a highly regarded international trade theorist, put out a call for economists to pay more attention to econonomic geography in a book entitled Geography and Trade, focussing largely on the core regional science concept of agglomeration economies. Krugman's call renewed interest by economists in regional science and, perhaps more importantly, founded what some term "the new economic geography," which enjoys much common ground with regional science.

Criticisms

Today there are dwindling numbers of members from academic planning programs and mainstream geography departments (the largest grouping in North America is probably at the University of Arizona). (Although, there has been some revival among geographers, as broadly-trained 'new' economic geographers combine quantitative work with other research techniques, for example at the London School of Economics.) Perhaps part of the decline in interest from practitioners in planning and geography may be due to the rise of geographic information systems and other readily used statistical and modeling software, which have allowed predictive modeling and analysis to be done more efficiently and by non-specialists. In fact, such easy quantification apparently has induced somewhat of a reactionary response among some in academic geography away from the quantitative analysis of human activities as an end in itself — or as a guide to planners or corporations.[citation needed]

Attacks on regional science's practitioners by radical critics began as early as the 1970s, notably David Harvey who believed it lacked social and political commitment. Such debates became strong and heated, as exemplified by some arguments by Trevor Barnes who suggests that the decline of regional science practice among planners and geographers in North America could have been avoided. He says "It is unreflective, and consequently inured to change, because of a commitment to a God’s eye view. It is so convinced of its own rightness, of its Archimedean position, that it remained aloof and invariant, rather than being sensitive to its changing local context." [4]

The dawning of globalization and the internet age has rendered one core technique of regional science, location theory, less applicable - since a number of social activities require no 'optimal spatial location' whatsoever. Then again, the unification of Europe and the increased internationalization of the world's economic, social, and political realms has generated more interest in the study of regional, as opposed to national, phenomena.

References

  1. ^ Isard, Walter. 1975. Introduction to Regional Science. Prentice Hall.
  2. ^ Ponsard, Claude. 1958. Histoire des Théorie Économique Spatiales. Pris: Libraie Armond Colin (translated in 1983 by Benjamin H. Stevens, Margaret Chevallier and Joaquin P. Pujol as History of Spatial Economic Theory. Springer-Verlag: New York.)
  3. ^ Boyce, David. 2004. "A Short History of the field of Regional Science," Papers in Regional Science, 83, 31-57. The source for a few dates in this paragraph.
  4. ^ Barnes in Canadian J of Reg.Sci. 1

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