Flower Child of the Quantitative Revolution and Second-Generation Regional Scientist

I was a flower child of geography’s quantitative revolution, and I am a second-generation regional scientist. My concept for this article is to ponder the vagaries of how academic careers get launched, the ways regional science wended its way into mine, and why, subsequently, our multidisciplinary institutions came to consume a large portion of my intellectual energies.

Various outstanding scholars were instrumental in mentoring me, and – through my spatial demographer’s lens – I’ve come to view the intellectual enterprise of regional science as being fundamentally about passing the torch to future generations (“What about aging in regional science,” The Annals of Regional Science, 2012).

I began my formal education in a one-room school, on the second floor of a WWII bombed-out manor house, in a small village in England. The year was 1961 (my dad, a Cornell University chemist, was at Oxford on a sabbatical leave). Our teacher, Miss Watson, was quite keen on math, but thought reading humdrum. She awakened in me an intuitive, conceptual approach to math that has served me in good stead throughout my academic career. I would grasp long division in that first year of school, but it would not be until third- grade that I would puzzle out how to read.

Growing up, I fancied pursuing a career as an architect; math and art were my favorite school subjects, with geometry a special passion. In 1972 I enrolled at Dartmouth College and began the pre-architecture curriculum. This involved vast swaths of studio art, but little actual architecture prior to senior year. So, in the meantime, I began taking geography classes. Dartmouth (which prides itself on doing whatever Harvard doesn’t) had retained geography as a major subject and continues to this day a proud tradition of launching the careers of numerous academic geographers (WRSA Fellow, Richard Morrill of the University of Washington, among the most distinguished).

At Dartmouth, I was mentored by geography professor Jack Sommer (who would later become a stalwart member of WRSA). Jack got me hooked on spatial analysis, directing me to the works of D’Arcy Thompson, Peter Stevens, Michael Woldenburg, William Warntz, Bill Coffey, Peter Haggett, Richard Chorley, and others advancing morphological perspectives on natural and human systems. And I became drawn to regional planning, which during that radicalized era seemed more socially relevant career than architecture. Working during leave terms for the office of the St. Lawrence County (New York) Planning Board, I drafted Ian McHarg-style (Design with Nature) overlay maps: the precursor, in many ways, to modern GIS layer analysis.

When it came time to choose a graduate program, Professor Sommer gave me a list of what he considered the top North American geography departments and leading “quantifiers” (that quaint, somewhat pejorative label for those then spearheading Anglo-American geography’s spatial analysis revolution). Among the schools on his list was the University of Pennsylvania, and, among the scholars, Walter Isard. My dad was at that time the Provost of Cornell (according to long-time RSAI archivist, Barclay Jones, during his tenure he approved the creation of Cornell’s Regional Science doctoral program) and he, too, suggested I go down to Philadelphia to talk with Walter about graduate school possibilities. I remember sitting on a stack of papers in the Founder’s (perpetually overstuffed-with- research-detritus) office and asking: “Should I enroll at Cornell or Penn?” Thinking a moment, he replied: “For you, David, Penn.”

With a plan to ultimately become a transportation planner, during my Master’s year of 1976–1977 I studied with David Boyce and Bruce Allen. I recall David chuckling when he informed us we shouldn’t plan on going anywhere for spring break, because Alan Wilson would be coming across the pond to give a week of seminars on entropy modeling. Those masterfully presented lectures, plus a later presentation by Folke Snickars on his work with Jörgen Weibull on a “Minimum Information Approach” to trip distribution modeling, along with Ron Miller’s elegantly presented courses on input-analysis, and Masa Fujita’s on location theory, laid the seedbed for my later dissertation work. Under the direction of Tony Smith, Dan Vining and Janet Madden, I investigated information-theoretic approaches to modeling temporal change in human migration patterns.

My academic career path was altered dramatically one day when Andrew Isserman popped into my grad student carrel at Penn. Andy informed me I was being hired – along with Larry Klein’s student, Paul Beaumont – to go to  the U.S. Census Bureau as part of his American Statistical Association Fellow’s project to develop novel, combined economic/demographic population projection methodology. I naively told Andy: “No thanks; I think I want to continue working on transportation.” Alas, as others can readily attest, telling Professor Isserman, “No,” was virtually impossible. I soon found myself – sans any formal training in demography – the population specialist on the ECESIS Model development team. I owe a great debt of gratitude to John Long, Signe Wetrogan and others in the Bureau’s Population Division, as well as Andy, for providing on-the-job training in population analysis and for launching what was to become my primary career focus: the geographical analysis of population distribution and migration.

During the second year of the project, Peter Rogerson (then ABD at the University of Buffalo) was hired onto the ECESIS team, and he and I began our long and productive research collaboration and friendship, including joint authorship of our text and practical handbook, The Geographical Analysis of Population.

My first regional science conference attended was in 1974, at the Philadelphia North American meetings. I presented my first paper at the 1980 North American Meetings in Milwaukee; Kingsley Hayes gave the discussant remarks (after re-presenting much of my paper, which I’d been too nervous to get across very coherently). Also in 1980, I entered the faculty job market. A long interview trip took me out west, including, among other stops, to my first Western Regional Science Association conference in Monterey, California, and to Tucson, where I instantly hit it off with the geographers and regional science crew at the University of Arizona. Arthur Silvers, Gordon Mulligan, Carol Taylor West, Alberta Charney, David Barkley, and others were then in that outstanding group. (As I recall, during my interview Lay Gibson was off traveling somewhere else in the world, but he rolled out the welcome mat for me at WRSA.)

David with his wife, Kathy Jacobs during the 50th Anniversary Dinner of the WRSA in Monterey, California 2011

As a mongrel geographer/demographer, my own research is not as economics- oriented as that of many regional scientists, yet regional science has always provided my primary intellectual home. As I argued in my short 2005 piece in the Papers, “On discipline and disciplines in regional science,” I believe regional science offers “an almost perfect disciplinarily neutral meeting ground.” As in Walter’s vision, it continues to attract top minds bringing technical prowess from many directions to important societal issues of space and location. And the plain and simple style of regional science – it’s all about the scholarship and collegiality without the extraneous trappings of other disciplines and groups – has engendered remarkable loyalty among its adherents.

I’ve felt an almost missionary zeal in promoting regional science institutions and have devoted substantial energies over the decades to building regional science institutions. My first assignment came in 1984 at the Denver Meetings, when Walter Isard informed me that, henceforth, Peter Rogerson and I would become the North American Co-Editors of the Papers of the Regional Science Association. We proceeded to scramble to assemble some good papers for our first issue!

Prior to the 1988 North American Meetings in Toronto, David Boyce organized a (Quaker-meeting style!) workshop to discuss organizational structure of the Association, where it fell to me to draft the initial Constitution of the North American Regional Science Council (a document that took its inspiration, in part, from the Council of the Iroquois Indian confederation).

Shortly thereafter I worked with Lay Gibson to put together the first version of the RSAI Constitution.

In 1990, at the behest of the RSAI Council, I was tasked with transforming the old-style Papers, which had consisted exclusively of papers presented at the three major, superregional conferences, into a regular, quarterly journal. I served a three-year term as the first Editor-in- Chief of what we retitled: Papers in Regional Science: The Journal of the RSAI. Geoff Hewings, long-time Secretary of the Association, was extremely supportive, contributing substantially to that transformation. (As part of the effort, I paid a University of Arizona undergraduate art student, whose name, alas, I do not remember, the munificent sum of $50 to design the four-hexagon RSAI logo.)

In 1991, Lay Gibson handed me the reins as Executive Secretary of the WRSA, a post I would hold, with enthusiasm, through 2011.

In 1994 Ron Miller asked me to take over as Editor of the Journal of Regional Science. By then well into my first term as Head of the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, I agreed, but only on the condition that I be allowed to co-edit with my more economics-oriented colleague, Gordon Mulligan.

I’ve had the immense pleasure of organizing a plethora of regional science conferences: some nineteen WRSA Annual Meetings (in spectacular venues!) from 1992 to 2011; North American Meetings in Houston in 1993 (assisting Janet Kohlhase), Santa Fe in 1998 and San Francisco in 2006; and the Pacific Conference in Portland, Oregon, in 2001.

I’m deeply honored to have been tapped to serve as President of both PRSCO (2002–2003) and NARSC (2010), to have been selected as a recipient of the David E. Boyce Award for distinguished service, and to have been elected as a Fellow of both WRSA and RSAI.

Regional Science has been very very good to me. It has given me the opportunity to participate in the flowering and maturation of a significant, international scholarly movement; to help build a multidisciplinary professional enterprise; and to forge a plethora of academic friendships around the globe. I hope all of us in “Club Regional Science” (as our late Springer-Verlag editor, Marianne Bopp, so aptly dubbed our collegial network) will place top priority on nurturing the third and now fourth generations of regional scientists. We should entrust in their youthful enthusiasm and energies, much as the founding generation did during the formative period of my – and my cohort’s – careers.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2013 November)

I became involved in Regional Science in 1972 when the economist Professor Alex Kerr invited me, along with a number of other people in Australia to attend a meeting to discuss the formation of an Australia and New Zealand Section of

Regional Science. I thus became one of a small group who were the founders of ANZRSAI, with our first annual conference being held in 1976. I’ve been heavily involved in the Regional Science Association ever since, attending my first overseas meeting that same year – the North American annual conference held in Toronto.

In the time since then I have been to all except five (I think that’s correct) of the annual meetings of ANZRSAI, and I was President of that Section for three years from 1980 to 1982. For the first time in 1981 we hosted PRSCO in Australia.

From the early 1980s I became a regular participant in the WRSA meetings, as well as PRSCO and NARSC meetings, and from the 1990s I have been a frequent attendee at ERSA meetings, and since 2000 I have had the pleasure of occasionally attending the annual meetings of the British and Irish, the French Speaking and the Italian Sections, and also meetings of the recently formed sections in Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

So regional science has been a major part of my life, and the involvement in RSAI activities over what is now a span approaching four decades had resulted in not only making countless good friends around the world, but also in developing a number of most productive research collaborations that have resulted in publishing a number of books and other publications.

International collaborations with other regional scientists have included Reginald Golledge, Rick Church, Lay Gibson, Edward Blakely, Roger Stough, Kingsley Haynes, Alan Murray, Antoine Bailly, Peter Nijkamp and Patricio Aroca.

I was deeply honoured when I was asked to become the President of RSAI in 2005 and 2006. And then in 2010 I was elected as Fellow of RSAI, an award that I cherish more than any other. Earlier in 1997 ANZRSAI had honoured me by making me a Life Member; in 2010–11 I was appointed President of WRSA; and in 2012 ANZRSAI presented me with the Distinguished service award.

All of this has been a life-enriching and career-enhancing experience that I never dreamed of when I started out as a young academic human geographer in an isolated country at the end of the world in the mid-1960s. I owe a great debt to regional science and the involvement in RSAI has been immensely enjoyable.

Reflecting on one’s career as an analytical human geographer and regional scientist and the research in which I have been involved, it is interesting to identify in my case a number of distinct phases that seem to have run for overlapping spans of about a decade each.

When I started out as a Senior Tutor in Economic Geography at the University of Melbourne in 1966 (after a few years as a high school teacher following my undergraduate course at the University of New England in Armidale in rural New South Wales where I had grown up and gone to school), marking the beginning of phase 1 of my career, I had commenced conducting research into the patterns of post-war immigrant settlement in Melbourne. Then in 1968 when I moved to a lectureship in Geography in the School of Social Science at the two-year-old new Flinders University in Adelaide I extended this interest in social urban geography to investigate social differentiation in residential areas of cities and the residential location decision and choice. The latter was the topic in which I undertook my doctoral research while teaching at Flinders U. That then morphed (by the late 1970s) into a wider interest in investigating socio-economic advantage/disadvantage in cities within a welfare geography framework that was inspired by the writings of the geographer David Smith. That has tended to remain a theme in some of my research up till the present. Part of that research effort was to publish a highly successful and widely used Social Atlas of Adelaide.

The 15 years I spent at Flinders marked phase 2 in my career. In many ways the years at Flinders were dominated by my developing a keen interest in the collection of primary data through survey research to investigate aspects of human spatial behaviour. That was spurred through two important influences that led to a long period of collaboration first with Reginald Golledge (the doyen of analytical behavioural geography and a former tutor of mine when I was an undergraduate at UNE), and Charles Cannell and Robert Marans in the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan where I spent a sabbatical in 1976. While at Flinders U, with a colleague Tony Cleland, a psychologist, we set up the Centre for Applied Social and Survey Research, of which I became the Director. CASSR was one of three survey research centres in universities in Australia at that time, the others being at the University Sydney and the Australia National

University (ANU), with which we developed productive collaborations, along with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Through CASSR I became heavily involved in multi-disciplinary research involving colleagues from a variety of disciplines. This phase I have referred to as the ‘sales and service’ days of my career, and it was great fun.

Phase 3 of my career saw me placing an increasing emphasis on undertaking research to inform public policy. While at Flinders U in the late 1970s I had become heavily involved in housing policy analysis. But following a move to Canberra (the national capital), where I became Director of the Australian Institute of Urban Studies (AIUS), my work became almost exclusively policy- oriented. At AIUS we conducted policy research on a variety of urban topics, including rental housing provision, foreign investment, urban real estate, and local economic development (the latter being undertaken in conjunction with Edward Blakely). The second part of my seven years in Canberra was spent as the Dean of the Management School at The Canberra College of Advanced Education, later to become the University of Canberra, where there was a strong teaching program in public sector management. Not surprisingly the administrative load was heavy, and my research was dependent more and more on collaborative effort with others taking much of the lead.

That focus on public policy was continued when in 1990–91, having completed my five-year stint as dean, I was enticed to Brisbane, Australia’s third largest metropolitan region by the then Lord Mayor of Brisbane City, Sallyanne Atkinson, to lead

The Brisbane Plan project, which developed a comprehensive strategy for the development, planning and management of the city for the next 20 years. That begun phase 4 of my career, which was predominately concerned with addressing urban planning issues with a focus on housing and economic transition and urban development. In 1991 I was appointed to the newly established Chair in Urban Studies at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and began a research program monitoring the performance of the Brisbane-South East Queensland region.

Then in 1997 the Vice Chancellor of the University of Queensland (UQ) enticed me to relocate to UQ to a Chair in Geographical Sciences and Planning, where I had the role of providing leadership in developing a higher profile for urban and regional research in the university. Thus began phase 5 of my career. A new node of AHURI was also established at UQ. While there was a continuing focus on urban research, I also began a substantial effort to develop a much more explicit focus on regional economic development and especially on measuring and modelling endogenous regional performance. That involved collaboration with Roger Stough and Patricio Aroca. That orientation also led to me being asked to join with Peter Nijkamp and Roger Stough to be part of the group organising the Tinbergen Institute workshops that bring together 20 to 25 senior and young scholars to give papers on a theme in regional development focusing in particular on aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship. Those workshops have produced a number of edited books and special issues of journals. This is an example of how regional scientists collaborate to organise highly productive small events in a collegial atmosphere.

At UQ we developed the Centre for Research into Sustainable Urban Futures, of which I was the director, which later became the Urban and Regional Analysis program in the newly established Institute for Social Science Research. The research conducted at UQ over the period from 1998 to 2010 involved teamwork. Most of that work involved multi-disciplinary teams and covered a range of urban and regional fields including: evaluating homelessness programs in Australia; investigating the operation and future of the retirement village industry in Australia; conducting surveys to model subjective quality of urban life; modelling urban and regional opportunity and vulnerability in Australia; and building a large scale urban model for the Brisbane-South East Queensland. We also had a focus on developing spatial decision support systems, an initiative that in fact dated back to the late 1990s with Alan Murray when he was a Research Fellow with me, first at QUT and then at UQ.

Phase 6 of my career also emerged while I was at UQ when in 2004 a group of social scientists from universities across Australia won a bid to establish one of the new Australian Research Council’s Research Networks. Thus, the AUC Research Network in Spatially Integrated Social Science (ARCRNSISS) was established and I became the convenor for the life of the Research Networks program for the five years from 2005 to 2009. ARCRNSISS was a consortium of 18 universities and two federal government agencies and had more than 500 individual participants, along with some international participation. Among many things, we also put almost 100 graduate students through an annual residential Summer School in Spatially Integrated Social Science Theory, methods and Applications. And we developed with additional ARC research infrastructure funding a Shared Research Resources with data from some federal agencies and researcher generated data sets incorporation an e-Research Facility for Socio-Spatial Analysis and Modelling.

I was retiring at the beginning of 2011 when the University of Melbourne asked me to be the Director of the newly established Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AUTRIN), a $20 million federal government funded project to develop an e-Infrastructure for facilitation access to diverse distributed data sets, data integration, and data interrogation through the provision of on-line e-research spatial, statistical and visualisation tools to enhance research capability for urban and built environment researchers in Australia.

Looking back over my career I have been privileged to have been a university teacher and researcher during an era of great change. Especially in Australia, the period from the 1960s to the 1980 was really a time of rapid development of the university system.

University life was highly collegial and it was really a lot of fun being part of it. I think the managerialism that has taken over universities to a significant degree since is a shame as the academy seems to have lost influence and certainly control of many of the important aspects of universities. Now it’s all about key performance indicators, frequent restructuring, and often the loss of discipline identity. The collegiality of regional science is more and more a welcome heaven to escape from all of that.

If I had a message for younger up-and- coming regional scientists it would be to take every opportunity that RSAI offers for developing an international network that leads to collaborative research.

RSAI is a unique institution to which many of the finest scholars in the world belong and they are very collegial and open to assisting younger scholars.

RSAI can literally open up the world for you. Embrace it; you won’t be disappointed; it will be richly rewarding as well as being a lot of fun.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2013 May)

Place and Time: The Right Place at the Right Time

While I was an M.S. student at Penn State in 1956, I saw a booklet published by the Association of American Geographers which gave the names of dissertations written by students in U.S. and Canadian university Ph.D. programs. Just a few departments caught my attention as places where my interests might lie. Allan Rodgers, a professor at Penn State and an inspiring teacher, encouraged me to seek a challenging research environment. After spending five years at Penn State happily working on bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I decided on the University of Washington. At Washington, my fellow grad students included Brian Berry, John Nystuen, Bill Bunge, Michael Dacey, Waldo Tobler, Richard Morrill, and Duane Marble. My professors were William Garrison, Edward Ullman, Arnold Zellner, Morgan Thomas, and Marion Marts. What a group! No need to seek stimulation – it was there every day.  Important questions having to do with central place theory, city growth, transportation, trade, and retail location were argued and discussed. Donald Hudson, the chair at UW, opened the xerox copier room to grad students so that they could circulate their ideas. The environment was electric. Garrison, in his gentle way, ruled over this surfeit of intellectual curiosity. The underlying theme was that geography, as a discipline, was moribund, simple-minded, and useless, and if it was to survive as an intellectually respectable field it would have to become scientific. We spouted theories, tested hypotheses, copied techniques from the quantitative economists and, in general, set out to remake the discipline. Of course, there was resistance, not only at Washington, but among the field’s leadership at such places as the Universities of Wisconsin and Syracuse. This only increased our resolve, but unfortunately, some of the main journals rejected our papers on the grounds that they were too quantitative. When the University of Chicago’s department hired Brian Berry, it was like the breakthrough that opened the door to others of the Washingtonians. Before long, Northwestern, Michigan, Michigan State, and Pennsylvania, where Walter Isard was laying the groundwork for the new field of regional science, had young Washington Ph.D.s on their faculties.

Fortunately for me, I met my wife to be, Judy Marckwardt, at Washington. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan she had asked John Nystuen, who was a faculty member at UM, where she might do graduate work. He enthusiastically described Washington to her. She specialized in cartography under the tutelage of Professor John Sherman, a well-known cartographer sympathetic to the Garrison-led school. Instead of taking an NDEA fellowship to Princeton to study historical cartography, she decided to go with me. We were married in Ann Arbor, her hometown, where her father was an exceptional scholar in the English/Germanic languages and literature. I mention this simply because our household, inspired by Al Marckwardt at Michigan, for us first at Michigan State then at Rutgers became an academic cauldron where Judy and eventually our three children spent most of their time devoted to their studies. Judy was employed by Educational Testing Service of Princeton and eventually our girls became students at the University of Illinois’ experimental school, Uni High. Hilary, my oldest child, while a high school student in Illinois, became a Presidential scholar.

While I was at Michigan State,  Bill Bunge at Wayne State, Waldo Tobler and John Nystuen at Michigan, and Don Blome and I formed what we called the Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Mathematical Geography (MICMAG).

John developed a working paper series that added to and continued similar types of series established at Washington, Northwestern, Iowa, and Ohio State. In this atmosphere, deepening knowledge of Christaller, Lösch, Isard’s regional science, and the new ideas emanating from Harold McCarty’s Iowa school were discussed.

Michael Dacey managed to have influential quantitative papers published in the journals of Economic Geography and the Annals of the AAG, finally establishing quantitative geography as a mainstream sub-discipline of geography. Together with others, I taught modeling and probability theory at Northwestern University Summer Institutes. Our students were mainly faculty from around the country and world who wanted to learn of the new techniques in geography.

The revolutionary spirit felt strongly by the Washingtonians had spread to England. Peter Haggett, a Cambridge Ph.D. and a friend of Brian Berry, was hired at Bristol University, where I visited in 1966–67. He, with Richard Chorley of Cambridge, became the “terrible twins” of the new geography in Britain. Among the new geography “scientists” at Bristol were David Harvey, Michael Chisholm, Allan Frey, Barry Garner, Andrew Cliff, Roger Downs, and Barry Boots. A young Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, Keith Ord, had just arrived at Bristol in the economics department. Originally from the same town in Yorkshire as was Andy Cliff, these two got together to work on something called “spatial autocorrelation.” Although one result of their work was the creation of a new spatial autocorrelation statistic, they named it not after themselves (which I think they should have) but for the statistician who laid the groundwork for it, P.A.P. Moran. They developed the rationale for the statistic, created the formulation for its variance, recognized its nuanced difference when used for testing residuals from regression, and published all of this in a Pion monograph in 1973 to be expanded into a full volume with examples in 1981.

During these years I joined the young quantifiers testing central place theory, creating point pattern analytic routines, and trying to instill in my students a love for the analytic side of geography. Some of this work was with Barry Boots who, after Les Curry died and Yorgos Papageorgiou retired, went on to become the leading quantitative geographer in Canada. Barry and I had a book on pattern analysis published by Cambridge University Press. As a graduate committee member in those early years, I advised, among others, Boots, Kingsley Haynes, Marc Armstrong, and Peter Muller.

Judy and I realized that to finish the formal education of our children we would have to enhance my salary. We wrote a textbook (with Jerome D. Fellmann, a colleague at Illinois) called Introduction to Geography, which is now in its 13th edition. We were then able to send our daughters to the colleges they adored: Hilary to Harvard, Vicky to Oberlin, and Annie to UC Santa Barbara.

In the 1980s, except for the influence of the new technologies used in GIS, geography began to return to its original non-scientific state. Many of the early geography quantifiers felt the decline of scientific geography and sought the stimulation emanating from the field of regional science. I spent the Spring Semester of 1970 with Walter Isard at his Regional Research Institute at Harvard. I found the meetings of the Regional Science Association exciting and stimulating. One day, after many tries at developing the variances for something that became local statistics, I got in touch with Keith Ord and asked if he might want to give it a go. At that time, in the 1980s, Keith had left England for a position at Penn State.

We developed a smooth working relationship. He was able to come up with the required proofs. I was then at the University of Illinois with Geoff Hewings and a host of other outstanding scholars. Keith and I developed something called the Getis-Ord G statistics which we published in Geographical Analysis. Soon after, Luc Anselin, took the global statistics, Moran’s I and Geary’s c, and created a family of local spatial autocorrelation statistics called LISA (Local Indicators of Spatial Association). These events, the creation of G statistics and LISA, triggered new research on the local characteristics of a myriad of georeferenced variables. But, perhaps most significantly, these statistics became an arm of spatial modeling, pattern analysis, and the all-important tests needed for residuals from regressions of various kinds. They have given rise to cluster determination, spatial filtering, and tests on many aspects of spatial autoregressive models.

In the mid-1980s, I took a sabbatical from Illinois to UC Santa Barbara, mainly to interact with Waldo Tobler. Fortunately for me, Luc Anselin had recently arrived in the geography department there from Ohio State’s urban planning department. Luc’s work with spatial autocorrelation further stimulated me. Luc was finishing for publication his book Spatial Econometrics: Methods and Models. I had a chance to review it. The book easily can be used as a text on spatial modeling. It has gone on to become the most heavily cited book  in the field of spatial econometrics, and it motivated me to consider the structure of spatial weights matrices and a host of other spatial concepts.

Unknown to me in the late 1980s was that San Diego State University had applied for a Ph.D. program in geography that would emphasize the scientific aspects of the field. Rules of separation between the University of California (UC) and the California State Universities (SDSU is a member of CSU), required SDSU to seek a cooperating program in the UC system. Ernst Griffin, chair at SDSU, asked UCSB to be their partner in the development of a joint Ph.D. program. David Simonett at UCSB agreed. I left Illinois to take on the directorship of that program. It seems that my association with both UCSB and a one semester visiting professorship at SDSU helped make the spatial transition relatively easy. Not long after, in the early nineties, I moved into the Stephen and Mary Birch Endowed Chair of Geographical Studies at SDSU, and Douglas Stow took over the directorship of the program. It was at that time, in the early 1990s, that the Getis-Ord statistic was published in Geographical Analysis. In the meantime, I worked on the concept of spatial filtering using both G statistics and the notion that with georeferenced data it was possible in a variable to separate that which was due to spatial autocorrelation from that which is not due to spatial autocorrelation. This notion was called spatial filtering. In addition, Keith and I continued our collaboration developing an O statistic that tested for local spatial autocorrelation in the face of global spatial autocorrelation and more recently we have created an H statistic that tests for spatial heteroscedasticity.

Throughout the 1990s I became deeply involved in the adaptation of GIS for spatial analysis. My Ph.D. student, Lauren Scott, now of ESRI, has done much to popularize spatial statistics in ESRI analytical products. Another one of my Ph.D. students, Jared Aldstadt and I worked on using the concept of spatial autocorrelation to find spatial clusters.

We arrived at something called AMOEBA (A Multi- Directional Optimum Ecotope-based Algorithm) which efficiently finds statistically significant, irregularly-shaped clusters in mapped patterns of independent and dependent variables. Concomitantly, in the early 1990s, under the leadership of Manfred Fischer of Vienna, three us, Manfred, Bill Williams of Oxford and I launched a new journal, Geographical Systems (which later became the Journal of Geographical Systems). The journal emphasizes theoretical and empirical contributions to spatial analysis. It remains a strong, high-level journal nearly 20 years after its birth.

It finally struck me that if this work were to be situated in applied fields I would have to become involved with groups studying such things as the spatial distributions of crime and disease.  At first I worked in crime analysis and then when Amy Morrison, an epidemiologist now at UCDavis, got in touch with  me, my focus became infectious diseases, and in particular dengue fever. This work took me to Puerto Rico, Peru, and Thailand. Much of our statistical work is aimed at finding ways to control the spread of the disease. My role has been to identify any statistically significant spatial patterns of disease transmission. This work continues but has been expanded to the study of the environmental factors responsible for varying levels of women’s health in Accra, Ghana.

Throughout my academic life, I took every opportunity to spread the word of the importance of spatial analysis.

Among other venues in which I instructed were summer institutes. For a number of years in the early 2000s, I worked with Mike Goodchild and Don Janelle teaching graduate students and faculty from around the world about spatial analysis. I note with pleasure that many of these young scholars have gone on to become fine faculty members in prestigious institutions.

Along the way, I had come to a number of crossroads. Especially when I found questions difficult to answer, I asked myself: Should I continue in this field of spatial analysis or seek administrative responsibilities or work in less challenging occupations? At Illinois, I gave the administrative route a try only to become frustrated with the politics of the university. My colleagues in regional science made it easy for me to come “home.” Fortunately for me because I happened to be in the right place at the right time, the challenges of spatial analysis became for me what may be called routine activity, activity that promoted intellectual stimulation and curiosity and brought me into contact with truly outstanding scholars and practitioners.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2012 November)

My academic origins were far removed from regional science. I graduated in Mathematics and I wanted to work as a mathematician. I had a summer job as an undergraduate in the (then new) Rutherford Lab at Harwell in the UK and this led to a full-time post when I left Cambridge. I was, in civil service terms, a ‘Scientific Officer’ which I was very pleased about because I wanted to be a ‘scientist’. I even put that as my profession on my new passport. It was interesting. I had to write a very large computer programme for the analysis of bubble chamber events in experiments at CERN (which also gave me the opportunity to spend some time in Geneva). With later hindsight, it was a very good initial training in what was then front-line computer science. But within a couple of years, I began to tire of the highly competitive nature of elementary particle physics and I also wanted to work in a field where I could be more socially useful but still be a mathematician. So I started applying for jobs in the social sciences in universities: I still wanted to be a maths- based researcher. All the following steps in my career were serendipitous – pieces of good luck.

It didn’t start well. I must have applied for 30 or 40 jobs and had no response at all. To do something different, sometime in 1962, I joined the UK Labour Party. I lived in Summertown in North Oxford, a prosperous part of the city, and there were very few members. Within months, I had taken on the role of Ward Secretary. We selected our candidates for the May 1963 local elections but around February, they left Oxford and it then turned out that  the rule book said that the Chairman and Secretary of the Ward would be the candidates, so in May, I found   myself the Labour candidate for Summertown. I duly came bottom of the poll. But I enjoyed it and in the next year, I managed to get myself selected for East Ward – which had not had a Labour Councillor since 1945 but seemed just winnable in the tide that was then running. I was elected by a majority of 4 after four recounts. That led me into another kind of substantive experience – three years on Oxford City Council.

And then a second piece of luck. I was introduced by an old school friend to a small group of economists in the Institute of Economics and Statistics in Oxford who had a research grant from the then Ministry of Transport in cost- benefit analysis. In those days – it seems strange now – social science was largely non-quantitative and they had a very quantitative problem – needing a computer model of transport flows in cities. We did a deal: that I would do all their maths and computing and they would teach me economics.

So I changed fields by a kind of apprenticeship. It was a terrific time. I toured the United States – where all the urban modellers were – with Christopher Foster and Michael Beesley and we met people like Britton Harris (the  Penn State Study) and I. S ‘Jack’ Lowry (of ‘Model of Metropolis’ fame). It was through the people I met on this trip that I had my first introduction to regional science. Back in Oxford, I set about trying to build the model. The huge piece of luck was that I recognised that what the American engineers were doing in developing gravity models could be restated in a format that was more Boltzmann and statistical mechanics than Newton and gravity and this generalised the methodology. The serendipity in this case was that I recognised some terms in the engineers’ equations from my statistical mechanics lectures as a student. This led to ‘entropy-maximising models’. I was suddenly invited to give lots of lectures and seminars and people forgot that I had this rather odd academic background.

Alan Wilson (centre) with colleagues, early 1970s

It was a time of rapid job progression. I moved with Christopher Foster to the Ministry of Transport and set up something called the Mathematical Advisory Unit, which grew rapidly, with a model-building brief. (I had been given the title of Mathematical Adviser: it should have been ‘Economic Adviser’ but the civil service economists refused to accept me as such because I wasn’t a proper economist!). This was 1966–68 and then serendipity struck again. I gave a talk on transport models in the Civil Engineering Department in University College London and in the audience was Professor Henry Chilver. I left the seminar and started to walk down Gower Street, when he caught up with me and told me that he had just been appointed as Director of a new research centre – the Centre for Environmental Studies – and “would I like to be the Assistant Director?” My talk had, in effect, been a job interview – not the kind of thing that HR departments would allow now! And so I moved to CES and built a new team of modellers and worked on extending what I had learned about transport models to the  bigger task of building a comprehensive urban model – something I have worked  on ever since. In the late 60s, regional science began to develop seriously in the UK and Europe and I recall giving a paper at a conference in London – was it the first British Section meeting or was it a European meeting? What I do remember is my naivety on conference presentations. I had written a very long paper – far too long – titled ‘Towards a comprehensive urban model’. John Parry Lewis was chairing the session and to my horror, as I was around the end of my introduction to what I was planning to say, he told me I had about five minutes left! Somehow, I survived.

By the end of the 60s, quantitative social science was all the rage. Many jobs were created as universities sought to enter the field and I had three serious approaches: one in Geography at Leeds, one in Economics and one in Town Planning. I decided, wisely as it turned out, that Geography was a broad church and had a record in absorbing ‘outsiders’ and so I came to Leeds in October 1970 as Professor of Urban and Regional Geography. And so I became a geographer! There was a newspaper headline in one of the trade papers with words to the effect that “Leeds appoints Geography Professor with no qualifications in Geography!” However, again, the experience was terrific. I enjoyed teaching. It led to long term friendships and collaborations with a generation that is still in Leeds or   at least academia: Martin Clarke, Graham Clarke, John Stillwell, Phil Rees, Adrian MacDonald, Christine Leigh, Martyn Senior, Huw Williams and many others – a long list. Some friendships have been maintained over the years with students I met through tutorial groups. We had large research grants and could build modelling teams. Geography, in the wider sense, did prove very welcoming and it was all – or at least mostly! – very congenial. Sometime in the early 1970s, I found myself as head of department and I also started taking an interest in some university issues.

But that decade was mainly about research and was very productive. In the mid-70s, I had three years as an Adjunct Professor in the Dept of Regional Science at Penn and I spent three weeks there each summer giving lectures. It was a period of close collaboration with Britton Harris that led to our 1978 paper on retail dynamics that has informed much of my work since. I attended many regional science conferences and odd remarks stick in my memory: Morton Schneider, for example, saying in a response to a presentation of mine, that I was the only person in the history of mathematics who used the letter ‘O’ as a variable!

By the end of the decade, there had been the oil crisis, cuts were in the air – déjà vu! – and research funding became harder to get. The next big step had its origins in a horse racing meeting on Boxing Day – was it 1983? – at a very cold Wetherby in Yorkshire UK. I was with Martin Clarke in one of the bars and we were watching – on the bar’s TV – Wayward Lad, trained near Leeds by Michael Dickinson, win the King George Stakes at Kempton.

Thoughts turned to our lack of research funding. It was at that moment, I think, that we thought we would investigate the possibility of commercial applications of our models. We first tried to ‘sell’ our ideas to various management consultants. We thought they could do the marketing for us. But no luck. So we had to go it alone. We constituted a two-person very part-time workforce. Our first job was finding the average length of garden paths in rural Oxfordshire for the Post Office! Our second was predicting the usage of a projected dry ski slope in Bradford, UK. We did the programming, we collected the data. We wrote the reports. We were once moved on by the management from outside Marks and Spencers store in Leeds when we were standing outside with clip boards trying to collect origin and destination data from customers! But then it suddenly was better. We had substantial contracts with W H Smith (a major UK high street chain) and Toyota (UK and Belgium) and we could start to employ people. It is a longer story that can’t be told here, but that is what grew into GMAP, with Martin Clarke as the Managing Director and driving its growth. At its peak, GMAP was employing 120 people (largely Leeds University geography students) and had a range of blue-chip clients. That was a kind of real applied geography and regional science that I was proud to be associated with.

Simultaneously in the 80s, I began to be involved in university management and I became ‘Chairman of the Board of Social and Economic Studies and Law’ – what in modern parlance would be a Dean. In 1989, I was invited to become Pro-Vice-Chancellor – at a time when there was only one. I left the Geography Department and, as it turned out, never to return. The then Vice-Chancellor became Chairman of the CVCP and had to spend a lot of time in London and so the PVC job was bigger than usual. In 1991, I found myself appointed as Vice-Chancellor and embarked on that role on 1 October in some trepidation. I was VC until 2004. It was challenging, exciting and demanding. It was, in Dickens’ phrase, ‘the best of times and the worst of times’: tremendously privileged, but also with a recurring list of very difficult, sometimes unpleasant, problems. But this is about geography and regional science: I somehow managed to keep my academic work going in snatches of time but the publication rate certainly fell.

I was Vice-Chancellor for almost 13 years and in 2004 I was scheduled to ‘retire’. This, however, seemed to be increasingly unattractive. Salvation came from an unlikely source: the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in London. I was offered the job of Director-General for Higher Education and so I became a civil servant for almost three years with policy advising and management responsibilities for universities in England. Again, it was privileged and seriously interesting, working with Ministers, having a front row seat on the politics of the day. But I always knew I wanted to be an academic again, so after a brief sojourn in Cambridge, I returned to academic life at University College London as Professor of Urban and Regional Systems – and that was over four years ago. This has been another terrific experience. I work with Mike Batty, an old modelling friend and Andy Hudson-Smith in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and a group of young researchers and students. I run a course for graduate students based on a book of mine which was published in 2010 – Knowledge Power – url: www.routledge.com/9780415553117 – and a course on urban modelling, written up as The science of cities and regions published by Springer in January 2012 – search Springer.com for details. What has been very exciting is that my research field, developed into the realms of what is now called complexity science, has become a hot topic. So research grants flow again. This includes £2.5M for a five-year grant from EPSRC for a five-year project on global dynamics – now 18 months under way – see the CASA web site for recent working papers. This embraces migration, trade, security and development aid: big issues to which real geography and regional science can make a significant contribution. It funds half a dozen new research posts and five PhD studentships. The shopping list of research challenges is a long one and so ‘retirement’ seems, hopefully, a long way away!

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2012 May)

Endowed Professor of Urban and Regional Systems at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

I began my education in my native South Korea in Architectural Engineering, studied Urban Design at Meistershule für Architekture, Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, Austria, and completed graduate study in planning at Princeton University with a Ph.D. degree in 1976.

I was first introduced to Regional Science by a colleague of mine, a Ph.D. student at Princeton, who showed me Walter Isard’s ‘Green Book’. The book opened my eyes at the time when I was struggling with searching for suitable methods for solving urban and regional problems. Luckily I met Professor Edwin Mills who taught me economic principles, which I integrated with regional science methods. This was the beginning of my wonderful career as a planner, engineer and regional scientist, searching for strategies for solving spatial settlement issues.

I am very proud of the career I have chosen following in my father’s footstep as a university professor, having chosen urban planning and regional science as my main focus of discipline. I must have done something good since my son also has chosen to be an academic.

Equipped with socio-economic theories based on engineering education and regional science methodologies, I have had a wonderful career.

In addition to publishing 8 books, 140 journal articles, book chapters, and professional articles in the areas of transportation planning, urban and regional development, global urbanization, geographic information systems, intelligent transportation systems and location-based services, I was fortunate to gain experience in solving real-world problems. In 1979–80, I served as the project director of the National Comprehensive Transportation Study of Korea, sponsored by the World Bank. I also directed the Optimal Transport Sector Development Project in Indonesia in 1990–1991. I have been an advisor to the ArRiyadh Development Authority (ADA) in Saudi Arabia since 1994.  I have been a Fulbright Scholar to Germany (1986) and Senior Fulbright Scholar to Korea (1994–1995).

Furthermore, I have served as International Conference Coordinator of the Regional Science Association (1988–1991); co-Editor of The Annals of Regional Science for the period of 1994–2005; a member of Council, Regional Science Association International (2008–2010); and served as President of the Western Regional Science Association (2008–09).

My research contributions are intended to advance both planning scholarship and practice surrounding issues of growth and change. As a regional scientist, I have searched for theories and methods that provide a framework for developing and evaluating realistic strategies for mitigating problems caused by human settlements, environmental degradation and economic growth in urban areas. As a planner, I have been a strong advocate for the practical side of the planning profession. I have consistently embraced opportunities to put my expertise in the field of urban planning into practice. My current research focus can be grouped in the following three topics:

Technologies and Cities

New technologies alter the physical possibilities of human settlement, as well as the economic, cultural, and political relations of everyday urban life. A great deal of my current research has focused on how new information technologies (IT)–the Internet, personal computers, personal digital assistants, and wireless communications–are transforming the world as we know it and how that transformation really takes shape in human settlements, particularly in urban areas.

Transportation, Land Use and Infrastructure Protection

Early in my career as an urban planner and a regional scientist, I became convinced that the analysis of transportation issues cannot be separated from other urban and regional activities. The majority of my research on transportation has to do with searching for fundamental causes and solutions for transportation problems stemming from land use, socio-economic factors, and the modern lifestyles of urban residents.

International Planning

According to the United Nations, the world will need to build new cities and/or expand existing cities to accommodate about 1.6 billion additional urban residents by 2030. This trend is the result of many complex socio-economic and political factors, and poses unprecedented challenges to the functioning of cities and the quality   of life for urban dwellers. The resources needed for accommodating new urban dwellers will be enormous. Can we plan sustainable future cities? With this question in mind, I have collaborated with scholars from various parts of the world in implementing research projects investigating population and urban growth and change in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Sweden, Kenya, Poland and the USA.

The basic question I address in my research has been “What would be the major economic, social, and environmental implications, particularly in an urban context, in the event of specific changes in technology and lifestyle?” I am continually searching for improved frameworks to apply to the formulation of scenarios regarding sustainable urban and regional development. At the same time, it is my view that the potential to increase the utility of living in  urban areas while simultaneously facilitating environmental sustainability depends not only on planning, economic instruments, and new technologies, but also upon education and the cooperation of citizens through changes in their lifestyles.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2011 November)

Manfred Fisher, University of Vienna, Austria

Manfred M. Fischer is Professor Ordinarius of Economic Geography at the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna University of Economics and Business), and Adjunct Professor at the University of Vienna. He holds a Dr.rer. nat. degree (1975, summa cum  laude) in geography and mathematics from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen- Nuremberg  and  a Dr.habil. degree (1982) in human geography from the University of Vienna. He is one of the founding editors of the Springer book series on Advances in Spatial Science, and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Geographical Systems, a journal that bridges the work between regional science, quantitative geography and GIScience.

For about 35 years Manfred has been involved in the development and application of (mathematical and statistical) models, methods and techniques in regional science and related fields, a time period during which he has published 32 books, 110 papers in refereed journals and 115 book chapters and encyclopedia articles. In recognition of his academic achievements, he has been named a fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.

In relation to the theme of this newsletter, Manfred sees a great challenge for regional scientists to analyse, for example, some of the regional consequences of climate change. In doing so, one has to be aware that the coupled atmosphere- ocean general circulation models – the most powerful tools today for global climate simulation – still run at relatively coarse horizontal spatial resolutions (ca. 300 km). To get regional information from such models one has to rely on some regionalization technique. Such a technique essentially rests on two assumptions, namely, the ability of general atmosphere-ocean circulation models, first, to provide accurate climate features over the region of interest, and, second, to produce reliable “predictions” of the response of broad scale climatic features to changes in external events.

Given these assumptions, the analysis of regional consequences of climate change is characterized by high degrees of uncertainty. Standard approaches to modelling the economics of regional climate change – even those that purport to treat risk by Monte Carlo simulations – very likely fail to account adequately for the implications of large impacts with small probability. Indeed, climate change appears to be a problem characterized by Knight-uncertainty. That is to say, modelling regional impacts of climate change is a monumental exercise in which various subjective probabilities have to be assigned in the course of the analysis. A Bayesian framework appears to be most appropriate to move forward quickly and surely, and creatively enough to realize the potential now before us.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2011 June)

Ann Roell Markusen is Professor and Director of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. This year, she is serving as the UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art.

“My work explores the intersection between industries and occupations, on the one hand, and regions on the other. Using my industrial organization, economic development, and public finance complements to a regional economics training, I have delved deeply into these intersections using my own backyards (Michigan, Colorado, Washington DC, California, Chicago, New Jersey, and Minnesota) as laboratories. Often that grounding has helped me craft new theoretical perspectives–an industrial districts typology (the basis of my Alonso Prize), conceptualizing human capital and operationalizing it via occupations, and the case for a consumption base theory of regional development.

Bit by the policy bug thirty five years ago (Mike Teitz’s phrase), I have sought a real-world policy counterpart for my research, taking leaves from my Colorado, Berkeley and other jobs to serve full time at every level of government and frequently writing op eds and policy advocacy pieces in the New York Times, LA Times and  sim.

Real world policy exposure, forcing me to deal with things often assumed away, has greatly strengthened my work. I particularly loved the years I worked on the military industrial complex, crafting the intellectual case for the substantial 1990s peace dividend worldwide.

Recently I have been documenting the formation, regional distribution, migration, and economic impacts of artists, a highly mobile, innovative and high self-employment occupation.

Athletes form an interesting contrast– while both groups are targets of urban development policy, artists are more highly educated and are more apt to be rooted and re-spending in their current regions. There are stronger arguments and evidence for the catalytic role of artists than athletes, though arguably, the sports world has done a better job of creating opportunities for local participation and recruitment of future professionals.

I appreciate the colleagues I have worked and RSAI’s opportunities for presenting research and receiving feedback. Mike Teitz, Andy Isserman, Karen Polenske, and Peter Hall have been wonderful sounding-boards and collaborators in research, as have my former students Amy Glasmeier and many others. Roger Bolton, Bill Alonso, and Walter Isard have been great role models. I look forward to seeing many more women and minorities in our ranks and leadership.”

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2010 November)

David Boyce is Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, near Chicago, and Professor Emeritus of Transportation and Regional Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he served until 2003.

During the past 40 years, my research interests have narrowed and become more focused. I began my academic career with an interest in methods related to metropolitan land use and transportation planning generally, and long-range forecasting in particular.  I also had an interest in the impact of transportation infrastructure on urban travel and location behavior, drawing on my early training in statistical methods. During the same early period, I learned about convex optimization methods and their extensions for deriving and solving certain travel and location models. Since 1980, I mainly focused on formulation and implementation of integrated travel forecasting models that is models that represent in a consistent manner the various choices that urban travelers make: route, mode, destinations for work, shopping and recreation, and even location of their residences. Most recently, I have been working with a model of route choice for congested networks based on the user or selfish equilibrium principle. Presently, my principal activity is writing a book on the history of the field of urban travel forecasting.

From 1968 until 1989, I served in various leadership positions of RSAI, primarily related to organization of international conferences. In late 1997, I became the RSAI Archivist, succeeding Barclay Jones who established the RSAI Archives at Cornell University during the 1970s, and continued as Archivist until his death in 1997. The purpose of the RSAI Archives is to collect, organize and preserve materials pertaining to the founding, development and influence of the Regional Science Association International (correspondence, newsletters, conference programs and abstracts, financial reports, directories, etc.). From time to time, I also advise individual regional scientists about placing their research papers in appropriate archives, such as their university archives or local or regional historical societies. Finally, I contact and encourage regional scientists who have been active in RSAI to arrange for the preservation of documents related to our association’s activities. And occasionally, I succeed in doing so! If you are interested in such arrangements for your own papers, please do contact me at d- This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2010 June)

Karen Polenske is Professor of Regional Political Economy and Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Some of us have wondered why more U.S. and European women are not attracted to the sciences and engineering as well as economics, regional science, and other disciplines that require mathematics. Encouragement to do mathematics (and statistics) is needed early from parents and teachers while girls are still in grade school and high school. Often young girls are discouraged from taking it beyond the required subjects, although the use of the computer may be changing this. I never gave much thought as to taking or not taking mathematics when I was in high school. I enjoyed maths and also enjoyed teaching other students about how to do the problem sets.

In high school, when I took geometry, I was the only girl out of about 200 in my class who was still attending the mathematics class. I was planning to be an extension agent, and my teachers could not understand why I wanted to learn maths. In graduate school, I was part of the first class in the economics department at Harvard University where we had the option of taking either a language or a mathematics examination. Until then, graduates were only required to pass the language examination. I took the maths option.

Look at the early issues (before 1960) of The American Economic Review, and you will find that articles were mostly devoid of equations, and authors used tables only to review historical or current data descriptively. Times have changed. Mathematics is now a regular part of most economic and regional science articles. Also many women attend the regional science meetings. Most do not realize how few women attended the early meetings. I remember one meeting in Chicago many years ago where Anna Nagurney and I were the only women in a group of over 100 men. Now, many women attend the annual meetings, and we have a get-together each year at the meetings, so that we become much better acquainted with one another (see Maureen Kilkenny’s article below).

I definitely think that having  more women attend the meetings, becoming Fellows of the Regional Science Association International, and playing an active role in the Regional Science Association is a move in the right direction. I am not as sanguine about the current emphasis on mathematics and econometrics, partly because I see too many articles where the authors do not understand the underlying economic concerns – their focus on the econometrics often obscures the importance of the underlying issues.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2009 October)

Peter Nijkamp is professor in regional and urban economics and in economic geography at the VU University, Amsterdam. His main research interests cover plan evaluation, multicriteria analysis, regional and urban planning, transport systems analysis, mathematical modelling, technological innovation, and resource management. In the past years he has focused his research in particular on quantitative methods for policy analysis, as well as on behavioural analysis of economic agents. He has been visiting professor in many universities all over the world and he is past president of the European Regional Science Association and of the Regional Science Association International. In 2004 he received the Founder’s Medal. Peter comments:

‘Since its genesis in the 1950s, regional science has addressed over the successive decades social science issues related to regional and urban development. The methodologies deployed in regional science analyses have shown a wide variety of approaches ranging from policy evaluation to spatial econometrics, from spatial impact assessment to computable regional equilibrium model- ling, and so forth. The orientation in regional science was explicitly interdisciplinary in nature.

Interdisciplinary research has become rather fashionable in recent years, as it is generally believed that new scientific discoveries are most likely to be found as the interface or edge of different disciplines. From this perspective, regional science has a pioneering role to play in the future of the social sciences. It should also be added that regional science seeks its thematic orientation in the study of regions as concrete spatial entities which might be investigated from different perspectives. Thus, regional science offers a prism through which regions can be analyzed; it is not an omniscience in itself.

The Regional Science Association International (a few years ago) decided to create a system of ‘Fellows’ to honour scholars who have significantly contributed to papers in regional science research. In my view, an RSAI fellow is not in the first place an honoured scientist, but a scholar whose task it is to render services to the broader regional science community, in particular the younger generation.

From my early encounters with regional science - in the early 1970s – I have been fascinated by the wealth of approaches and news that are generated to better understand the ‘secrets’ of regions. Regional scientists form a scientific community of scholars who are fascinated by the undiscovered nature of modern regions and who are part of a discovery tour that will never come to an end. Regional science research is a discovery race without a finish’.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2009 March)