Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science

1st Edition

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Author: Francisco J Martínez Concha

eBook ISBN: 9780128152973

Paperback ISBN: 9780128152966

Imprint: Academic Press

Published Date: 12th July 2018

Page Count: 294

Description

Microeconomic Modeling in Urban Science proposes an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of urban systems. It portrays agents as rational beings modeled under the framework of random utility behavior and interacting in a complex market of location auctions, location externalities, agglomeration economies, transport accessibility attributes, and planning regulations and incentives. Francisco Javier Martinez Concha considers the optimal planning of cities as he explores interactions between citizens and between citizens and firms, the mesoscopic agglomeration of firms and the segregation of agents’ socioeconomic clusters, and the emergence of city-level scale laws. Its unified model of city life is relevant to micro-, meso- and macro-scale interactions.

Key Features

• Presents a unified, coherent and realistic framework able to simulate complete urban systems
• Describes the use of discrete–choice and stochastic behavior models in the auction spatial-equilibrium market
• Includes computing outputs from Cube-Land modeling using GIS

Readership

Graduate and PhD students and early career researchers involved in modeling urban systems, primarily in urban and regional economics, transportation economics, economic geography, spatial network analysis, urban and regional planning, and environmental economics

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   2. Accessibility
   3. Theory of a discrete urban land market
   4. A stochastic model of urban systems
   5. Equilibrium analysis
   6. Dynamic of urban land use
   7. Applications and policy analysis
   8. City scale laws

Details

• No. of pages: 
• 294
• Language: 
• English
• Copyright
• © Academic Press 
• Published: 
• 12th July 2018
• Imprint: 
• Academic Press
• eBook ISBN: 
• 9780128152973
• Paperback ISBN: 
• 9780128152966   2018 

About the Author

Francisco Javier Martínez Concha

Francisco Javier Martínez Concha is Professor at the University of Chile. His research areas encompass land use theory and modeling, and methods of evaluation of urban management policies (including regulations and subsidies). He is the creator of the Land Model of Santiago (MUSSA) and directs the professional team that develops the computational package CUBE-LAND. He is the editor of three books, author of nine book chapters, and has published 25 ISI-indexed papers.

Affiliations and Expertise

Professor in the Civil Engineering Department in the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Chile, where he is the Dean of Faculty (2018-2022). He is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Complex Systems in Chile (ISCI).

The book is available in several online dealers, including the Publisher’s web at:

https://www.elsevier.com/books/microeconomic-modeling-in-urban-science/concha/978-0-12-815296-6

Brexit! The urban and regional implications workshop

Organised by the Cities Research Centre, School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University

Co-sponsored by the Economic Geography Research Group 

29th March, 2019

10am - 5pm

School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University

There is widespread belief that Brexit will have substantial economic consequences for regions and cities, but that the impacts and any subsequent economic recovery will vary across the UK. This workshop brings together various academics, and the public and private sectors, to discuss potential urban and regional impacts across the UK, and possible urban and regional strategies for mediating the economic consequences of Brexit. 

Speakers include:

Professor Philip McCann (Sheffield University Management School, University of Sheffield) Professor Anne Green (City REDI, University of Birmingham) Cllr Huw Thomas (Leader, Cardiff City Council) Dr Rachel Minto (Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University) Ben Cottam (Federation of Small Businesses) Professor Gill Bristow (School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University)

This is a free event but places are limited.

Please book a place through Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/brexit-the-urban-and-regional-implications-tickets-51249219796

The candidate must hold a PhD in economics, geography, urban studies or similar fields with a very strong quantitative focus. For full details see the job advert attached. Applicants should send the required documents to me (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) with the reference “UECE/02/SAICT/2017-TiTuSS/PD/applicant surname”. More details available here: https://goo.gl/in9i6P.

Required documents:

• · Motivation letter, CV, copy of PhD award certificate, copy of passport, 3 most relevant publications with brief justification, two letters of reference.
• · The closing date for applications is 25/11/2018.

Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to invite you to participate in the 18th International Scientific Conference „RETHINKING REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS”, which will be held on 29th November 2018 in Siauliai, Lithuania.

The special topic of the plenary session – Challenges of International Trade and Economic Potential of the Regions.

Registration deadline – November 6, 2018. www.su.lt/rethinking-regional (see Registration on the menu)

Conference fee - 30 EUR.

We kindly ask you to forward this information to the colleagues who might be interested in the conference.

Please find more information in the attached invitation.

Best regards,

Conference Organizers

The International Congress on Sustainable Development, 

Public Management and Territorial Governance

WSB University, Faculty of Applied Sciences 
28-31 May 2019, Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland

The International Congress on Sustainable Development, Public Management and Territorial Governance is organized in cooperation by: 
- WSB University, Poland
- University of Extremadura, Spain
- Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, Portugal
- University of Madeira, Portugal 
- FISAT, Spain 
The congress will take place between 28 and 31 May 2018, at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, 
WSB University, in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland.

This event will explore the ongoing dynamic, emerging issues and future challenges regarding territorial governance and public management as well as the other fields of research that may have an influence on sustainable development. 

Contextually, several themes will be addressed, namely: Public Management; Territorial Governance and Strategies; Cross-Border Cooperation and Inter-Regional Cooperation; Inter-Organizational Cooperation; Sustainable Planning; Sustainable Development; Smart Cities; Biodiversity Policies and Strategies; Accessibility and Connectivity Transport Systems; Sustainable Tourism Management; Sustainable Culture Management; Renewables Energies; Circular and Green Economy; Environmental Rights and Legislation; Migratory fluxes - Strategies, Management and Planning.

Early registration should be open until February 17, 2019. However, late registration will be possible as well. The registration deadline is April 30, 2019. Registration forms should be sent to the following address www.wsb.edu.pl/congress (congress registration).   

Registration fees: Early Registration – 280,00 €; Late Registration – 350,00 €; Student (subject to confirmation) – 200,00 €.

The payment should be made by April 30, 2019 to the bank account: 

ING Bank Śląski S.A.; 40-086 KATOWICE UL.SOKOLSKA 34; Poland
IBAN / account number: PL 05 1050 1227 1000 0023 3028 9576

code BIC (SWIFT)  INGBPLPW

Transfer name: „Congress 2018” + the name of the participant

Abstracts and papers in English, Portuguese or Spanishshould be submitted to the following 
e-mail address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  

The submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the Congress Scientific Committee, according to the adequacy of the contents of the Congress topics. Please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words. Posters may also be submitted – the authors should use the specific format available on the congress website.The submission process will take place between November 1, 2018, and April 30, 2019. Successful applicants will be informed on a regular basis, no later than May 5, 2019. The deadline for full papers is May 24, 2019.

Other works will be reviewed for possible publication in Scientific Journals associated with the event:

The best works will be invited to be published - as a book chapter - by the prestigious publisher “Thomson Reuters”(7^thworldwide position in scientific publications) – an additional payment 
of 300,00€ - the guidelines for authors could be found on the event website.  

Other works will be reviewed for possible publication in Scientific Journalsassociated with the event:

Forum Scientiae Oeconomia(ISSN 2300-5947), an international journal published in Poland, indexed in: EBSCO, ARIANTA, BazEkon, CEEOL, ERIH Plus, Google Scholar, Index Copernicus, PBN - Polska Bibliografia Naukowa, DOAJ (accredited by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education – 7 points) -no publication fees. 

Revista Monfragüe Desarrollo Resiliente(ISSN 2340-5457) -the journal focuses on scientific works regarding the approach of resilience, as a more concrete approach than the traditional concept 
of "Sustainability". Thus, the journal provides an open space of reflection and rigorous debate, 
for those who intend to enter the study of the resilient development - no publication fees.

The Organizers recommend also the possibility to submit the congress papers to the following special issues:

Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050)– special issue: Sustainable Cross-Border Cooperation: Common Planning, Policies, Strategies, Methods and Activities(Editors: Joanna Kurowska-Pysz, Rui Alexandre Castanho, Luís Loures) – publication fee according to the price list                          

Regional Science Policy & Practice(ISSN 1757-7802)– special issue: New trends and Dynamics on Territorial Management and Governance (Regional Editors: Rui Alexandre Castanho, Joanna Kurowska-Pysz, Katarzyna Szczepańska-Woszczyna) – publication fee according to the price list. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17577802and www.regionalscience.org.

Congress participants shall cover the publishing costs and pay fees directly to the publishers after the paper has received positive reviews.

If the proposal is accepted and the participant cannot attend the event, it is possible to send the poster – still, the registration payment is required.

Accommodation costs are not included in the congress fee. 

Congress languages: preferably English, however Polish, Portuguese and Spanish can also be used.

Contact persons:

Joanna Kurowska-Pysz, Rui Alexandre Castanho and Julian Mora Aliseda,
e-mail address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  

Hope to see you in Poland.

Organizers

The General Data Protection Regulation - information

WSB University stores your personal data in the database of persons to whom we send information about our educational offer and other marketing information. We have made every effort to ensure its security. 
If you do not want to receive information about our educational offer from us, including promotions and commercial information, please send an email to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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The Data Controller is WSB University, ul. Cieplaka 1c, 41-300 Dąbrowa Górnicza.
Since 25 May 2018, we have been served by a Data Protection Officer, whom you can contact at the following e-mail address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. in any matter pertaining to the abovementioned data.
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The above information refers to the processing of your personal data for the purposes indicated above and included in the database of people using marketing and commercial information.
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I am not sure whether these short presentations of the scientific and cultural trajectories of RSAI Fellows could be of any use or inspiration for younger scholars in regional science. In fact, as Dante meant with his Comedy, in societies there is no hero but anyone is the hero of his own story. Nevertheless, I trust the interpretation of market demand by the editors of our Newsletter that have asked this since many years. (Editors: we believe everyone has enjoyed reading these research autobiographies!)

The beginning of my research was not about regional issues but in a related field: industrial structure, market power, technological progress and innovation. But soon, discussing with my friend and, at that time, research partner Riccardo Cappellin, I felt a fatal attraction towards regional and urban issues and decided that my work should have been embedded into a wider theoretical dimension, that of space and ‘territory’. Interpreting interregional imbalance and the why and how of the existence of cities since history is there; and how human action does not inscribe itself into geography and history but molds geography and history themselves, or reacts unpredictably to the limits imposed by them.

Methodologically, I felt that theory and conceptualization should come first with respect to formalization and empirical testing and that these four steps should always come together sometimes and integrate each other. Moreover, I found disturbing and even harmful the conflict between formalised, stylised approaches and not-formalised, conceptual ones, both lacking their necessary counterpart, and the idea of a necessary convergence between the two became a continuous logical fil rouge of my research.

As early as 1980, I defined economic space as ‘relational’ in nature: “the set of functional and hierarchical relationships that happen on geographical space” (later on, I added social and even identitarian relationships). The necessary formalization and testing of this idea came two decades after, with the concept of ‘territorial capital’, namely “the set of local assets – material and immaterial, natural and artificial, public and private, cognitive, cultural and social – that constitute the competitive advantage and the attractiveness of places”; this was achieved through the construction of an ideal production function with heterogeneous capital assets, when the immaterial ones were increasingly made available by statistics at the regional level.

In the early stage of my career (the 1980s) I built models of innovation diffusion (robotics) explaining inter-regional time and spatial lags, and worked with regional input-output tables. I was able to show how the construction of a large transport infrastructure, the Autostrada del Sole linking Italy’s northern and southern parts in the early sixties, destroyed most of the handicraft production in light industries (clothing, furniture, food) of the south, challenged by northern mass production, while at the same time national economic policy was building huge capital intensive plants in heavy industries, creating the deficit in trade balance of the Mezzogiorno and its difficult employment equilibrium that persisted ever since. Building the first I-O table for an Italian region, Sardinia – an island, where external movements of goods are traced by ports and airports statistics – I showed how a ‘smart’ and integrated tourism investment like the Aga Khan’s in Costa Smeralda in the 1970s, encompassing infrastructure, hotels and villas, an airport, an air company and a shipyard, was comparatively the best for that area.

With Roberta Capello at the ERSA Conference in Porto, 2004

Moreover, in the same years, a relevant effort was paid to the construction of mathematical ecology and spatial self-organisation models, linked to precise theoretical and empirical questions. A prey-predator urban dynamics model interpreted the interaction between urban profits (the prey) and land rent (the predator), giving rise to urban life-cycles; a different, self-organisation dynamic model of an urban system - where a stochastic, Schumpeterian innovation element replaced the usual, deterministic export-base element - showed that, for the emergence of a full urban hierarchy in presence of agglomeration costs à la Alonso, increasing net returns to urban scale are crucially needed. This last model (1986), fully elaborated in cooperation with a mathematician, Giorgio Leonardi, and a planner, Lidia Diappi (interdisciplinarity matters!) supplied largely the basis for many subsequent theoretical and econometric advancements in urban economics, achieved recently by the team of regional scholars in our research group at Politecnico di Milano.

The years 1985-2000 were mainly devoted to the construction of the milieu innovateurs theory, an evolutionary approach to the development of local production systems realized by an international group of scholars gathered by Philippe Aydalot at Sorbonne in Paris, the GREMI, led by myself after Philippe’s premature death in 1987. The main theoretical element was represented by the role assigned to local space, that of uncertainty-reducing operator working through the socialized transcoding of information, ‘collective actions’ by private actors and processes of ‘collective learning’ (1991). Empirical testing of this theory was achieved by Roberta Capello in 1999.

With the late Richard Gordon, our American partner, in 1990 in Paris at a GREMI conference

In the same years, working with the scientific committee of DATAR, the French national agency for actions and policies of aménagement du territoire, I was asked to develop the economic rationale and a typology of cooperation networks among cities (réseaux de villes) (1993) that was subsequently used by the European Commission (namely in the ESDP). The concept was once again corroborated by Roberta for the WHO city network project. In these same years I prepared a textbook of Urban Economics (1992), later translated into French (1996) and Spanish, quite innovatively organizing the wide spectrum of existing literature into 5 principles + a summative one devoted to the theory of land rent.

The policy fall-outs of scientific elaborations were always a relevant goal in my mind, and was able to verify the importance of a sound theoretical background for the justification of my proposals when I had the opportunity to serve as Head of the Urban Affairs Department at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in Rome with the first Prodi Government (1997-98). I also had the same positive experience working in different times as consultant for the European Commission, with Commissioner Giolitti (1977-85), Wulf-Mathies (1997-98) and Cretu more recently, learning at my expense that innovative ideas necessarily – and rightly - need some time in order to be ‘digested’ by political administrations.

Scientific works of mine in more recent times are more accessible and well known. All were achieved thanks to the cohesion, enthusiasm and scientific efficiency of the present team in Milan, co-directed (and now directed) by Roberta Capello. I would just like to remind the MASST model for European regions - a macroeconomic, sectoral, social and territorial econometric model producing conditional quantitative foresights on a scenario basis built for the ESPON project – probably the only truly regional model in use, using the concept of territorial capital, now come to the fourth, updated and expanded version (2005- 2018); the TEQUILA model for territorial impact assessment of European projects and programmes, working at NUTS3 level, including quantitative impacts on territorial efficiency, territorial quality and – for the first time – territorial identity (2009); many works on urban issues (optimal city size; dynamic agglomeration economies; medium-size cities; urban strategic planning; economic assessment of large schemes of urban transformation) and regional and urban policy.

The Regional and Urban Economics team at Politecnico di Milano. Left to right: Ugo Fratesi, Giovanni Perucca, Andrea Caragliu, Camilla Lenzi, Silvia Cerisola, Roberto Camagni, Roberta Capello

When in 2010, after my presidency of ERSA, I was awarded the ERSA-EIB Prize, grateful and proud, again with Dante – when in the Limbo, being called to join the five great poets of antiquity, exclaimed: ed io fui sesto fra cotanto senno – I said “I am the sixth among such intellect” (in fact, the ninth!). The same gratitude and privilege that I felt last year when I was elected Fellow of the RSAI. But my deepest thanks goes to Roberta and the full Milan team, for the joy they provided me in working with them and the emotion for the fiesta and the publication of some of my works (Capello, 2017) they were able to organize – secretly! – last year for my (imposed) retirement.

References

• Camagni R., Capello R., Chizzolini B., and Fratesi U. (2008). “Modelling regional scenarios for the enlarged Europe”, Springer, Berlin.
• Camagni, R. (1980). “Teorie e modelli di localizzazione delle attività industriali”, Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, March-April, 183-204
• Camagni, R. (1991). “Technological change, uncertainty and innovation networks: towards dynamic theory of economic space”, in Camagni R. (ed), Innovation Networks: Spatial Perspectives, Belhaven-Pinter, London, 121-144
• Camagni, R. (1993). “From city hierarchy to city networks: reflections about an emerging paradigm”, in Lakshmanan T.R., Nijkamp P. (eds), Structure and change in the space economy, Festschrift in honor of Martin Beckmann, Berlin, Springer Verlag, 66-87.
• Camagni, R. (1996). “Principes et modèles de l'économie urbaine”, Economica, Paris.
• Camagni, R. (2009). “Territorial Impact Assessment for European regions: a methodological proposal and an application to EU transport policy”, Evaluation and program planning, 32 (4): 342-350.
• Camagni, R. (2009, 2019 2^nd ed.). “Territorial capital and regional development”, in Capello R. and Nijkamp P. (eds), “Handbook of regional growth and development theories”, Edward Elgar Pub., Cheltenham, 118-132.
• Camagni, R. (2016). “Urban development and control on urban land rents”, The Annals of Regional Science, 56 (3): 597-615
• Camagni, R., and Capello R. (2015). “Rationale and design of EU cohesion policies in a period of crisis”, Regional Science Policy and Practice, 7 (1): 25-49.
• Camagni, R., and Capello, R. (2002). “Milieux innovateurs and collective learning: from concepts to measurement”, in Acs Z.J., de Groot H.L.F., and Nijkamp P. (eds), “The emergence of the knowledge economy”, Springer, Berlin, 15-46.
• Camagni, R., and Gibelli, M. C. (1996). “Cities in Europe: globalisation, sustainability and cohesion”, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Dipartimento Politiche Comunitarie, European Spatial Planning, Rome, Poligrafico dello Stato, 93-179.
• Camagni, R., Capello R., and Caragliu, A. (2013). “One or infinite optimal city sizes? In search for an equilibrium size for cities”, Annals in Regional Science, 51: 309-341.
• Camagni, R., Capello R., and Caragliu, A. (2016). “Static vs. dynamic agglomeration economies: spatial context and structural evolution behind urban growth”, Papers in Regional Science, 95 (1): 133-158.
• Camagni, R., Diappi, L. and Leonardi, G (1986). “Urban growth and decline in a hierarchical system: a supply oriented dynamic approach”, Regional Science and Urban Economics, 1: 1945-1960.
• Capello R. (ed) (2017). “Seminal studies in regional and urban economics: contributions from an impressive mind”, Springer, Berlin

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2018 November)

I grew up in the north of England and went to school in Bury where I took ‘A’ Levels in maths, physics and geography in the sixth form. After leaving school in the mid-1960s, I took an undergraduate degree in geography at Sheffield University and a Master’s degree in planning, at Liverpool University. I was clearly a product of the quantitative revolution in geography which also affected planning and, in particular, planning methodology. My background in maths was to prove very useful in picking up the latest analytical methods and I was extremely fortunate that in my first two jobs, working in local authority planning departments in the early 1970s, I had a marvellous opportunity to use the these methods in a practical context.

The first two years of the geography degree at Sheffield were unremarkable and really quite dull. The final year, however, proved to be a turning point when a new professor was appointed, Stan Gregory. Gregory had made his name at Liverpool University as one of the leading lights in quantitative geography. His textbook on statistical methods had a major influence on British geography in the 1960s. I took full advantage of Gregory’s courses, including a Master’s-level module in multivariate statistics and what was surely a unique course on water resources development. I found this invaluable much later in my career when I began my involvement in the Mersey Basin Campaign, cleaning up North West England’s heavily-polluted rivers.

I wanted a career in which I could use geography and, with this in mind, had begun to think of doing a Master’s degree in planning. It was Stan Gregory again who steered me to Liverpool where one of his former students Ian Masser, by now a planning academic, was committed to re-structuring the Master’s curriculum to include analytical planning techniques. Ian deserves great credit for making me aware of the Regional Science Association and introducing me to the burgeoning regional science literature. Reflecting this, my Master’s dissertation on zoning system design combined two areas of regional science: geodemographics and spatial interaction modelling.

The early years of my professional career were spent in local government working in two local authority planning departments, Lancashire and Greater Manchester, in North West England. At the time large planning departments like these had a programme of applied research used to support strategic plan-making. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that large local authorities were far more active in planning research than most university planning schools. There was a genuine interest in fresh ideas that would advance the methods of plan-making. Despite being a new recruit and still in my early twenties, I was given a remarkable amount of freedom to work on a range of regional science methods and models, managing the projects myself. At Lancashire, for example, I had the opportunity in the early 1970s to develop and apply a Lowry model for the sub-regional plan of North East Lancashire. And, in the lead-up to a major local government reorganization in 1974, I had responsibility for carrying out two geodemographic classifications of small area census data for the new metropolitan authority, Greater Manchester Council, breaking new ground in planning practice. Soon afterwards, working as a transport planner, I led a project to develop and test the impact of long-term land-use scenarios upon the transport system of Greater Manchester using the SELNEC Model first developed by regional scientist Alan Wilson in the UK Government’s Mathematical Advisory Unit in the mid-1960s.

I have never regretted the time I spent in local authorities and I benefited enormously from the excellent environment they gave in which to do good applied work. However, I gradually realized that my future career lay in universities and that I needed to make the transition sooner rather than later. The ideal opportunity arose when Masser moved to a chair at the University of Utrecht in 1975. I was fortunate enough to be offered the lectureship he vacated at Liverpool.

Other recent appointments at Liverpool were Moss Madden and Peter Brown, both of whom had studied civil engineering before moving into planning and were therefore, like me, relatively numerate. Ian Masser, who had planted the regional science seed in all three of us, remained our mentor, in the absence of Liverpool-based research active senior colleagues. I developed a very productive working relationship with both of them, but on different topics.

Moss and I shared an interest in the integrated forecasting of population and economic activity. Up to that point, strategic planners generally made separate population and employment forecasts which were unlikely to be consistent one with another. Our major contribution to solving this problem came in the design and construction of a series of regional extended input-output models, adding demographic variables to the well-known Leontief inter-industry model. It led to us proposing the so-called Batey-Madden extended model which allows more realistic impact multipliers to be calculated by recognising the differences in income and consumption associated with households containing varying combinations of employed and unemployed workers. We collaborated on more than twenty papers in which the basic model was extended further and used in a number of practical situations, including measurement of the economic impact of regional demographic change and impact studies of airport expansion and tidal barrage construction. The paper I am most proud of presents a detailed structural comparison of nine different extended models (in Environment and Planning A, 17 (1), 1985). It was written during a sabbatical I spent at the University of Illinois and benefited greatly from the encouragement of Geoff Hewings, as did all of our work on input-output analysis.

My work with Peter Brown had a quite different focus. It built upon the earlier research I had done on geodemographic classification systems in Greater Manchester. The new research developed national classifications of residential neighbourhoods based on large amounts of socio-economic and demographic census data. Initially involving collaboration with Stan Openshaw, these geodemographic classifications – known as Super Profiles (1981 and 1991 censuses) and People and Places (2001 and 2011 censuses) - have been applied in a range of public policy and private sector commercial contexts over a thirty-year period. One of the most important applications was in the spatial targeting of urban policy initiatives and the measurement of targeting efficiency.

In the late 1980s Peter Brown and I bid successfully with colleagues from Manchester University for a regional research laboratory (RRL) as part of a major national initiative to promote social science GIS research, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. The Liverpool-Manchester RRL had a specific remit to carry out evaluations of urban policy and was encouraged to become self-funding by developing a portfolio of applied research projects, working with a wide range of public sector agencies. Throughout the 1990s there was a healthy demand for urban policy evaluation research and our RRL played a major role in this. I developed skills in partnership working, with fellow academics and with practitioners, and these have proved invaluable in my subsequent career.

The Regional Science Association

It is a common observation that in a professional career taking one opportunity often leads to another opportunity, mostly in an unplanned way. This certainly applies to my many and varied roles within the Regional Science Association. They have been a dominant feature of my whole career. I became secretary of the British Section in the 1970s at a time when regional science conferences in Europe were still largely organized from the RSA’s headquarters in Philadelphia by RSA founder Walter Isard. I was part of the movement that wanted European regional scientists to organize their own conferences and, as a founder member of the European ‘Core Group’ (later to become the EOC), I was lead organizer of the first truly European Congress, held in London in 1979. I never imagined that, in the next thirty years, I would perform the task twice more, for European Congresses in Cambridge (1989) and, with much personal satisfaction, in Liverpool in 2008. Or indeed that I would be invited by my British and Irish Section colleagues to join the Local Organizing Committee for this year’s European Congress in Cork.

Editing is another almost omni-present activity in my career. I was an early editor of Papers in Regional Science, and took on the editorship of two book series on behalf of the British and Irish Section: London Papers in Regional Science, followed by European Research in Regional Science. Currently I am working with David Plane (University of Arizona) on the first of a new series of books that focus on Great Minds in Regional Science. I often recall advice offered to me many years ago by Walter Isard himself: editing papers is an excellent way of keeping abreast with some of the best regional science research and maintaining a broad overview of the field. This has certainly been my own experience.

Over the years, my involvement in the RSAI has provided me with access to an extensive, world-wide community of fellow researchers and practitioners of regional science, and this has turned out to be a priceless asset. Not surprisingly the highlight for me was to be elected to serve as RSAI President: a lot of hard work yes, but also a great honour to be in a position to shape the future of our Association.

Twenty years on from the presidency, my RSAI involvement continues, now as the Association’s Archivist. The Archives are held at Cornell University in the US and provide a rich research resource on the institutional history of the RSAI. During my term as Archivist, I want to encourage more research on different aspects of the history of regional science: on influential regional scientists and on particular regional science concepts and techniques. In my own research I am interested in the history of planning methodology and in the influence that social science, including regional science, has had upon plan-making methods.

Other Activities

It would be wrong to leave this account without saying something about my other academic activities, carried out alongside a career in regional science. When, in 1989, I was appointed to the Lever Chair in Town and Regional Planning at Liverpool, I took a conscious decision to play a fuller role in planning practice, as all of the previous holders of this distinguished chair had done. In my case the obvious thing to do was to develop a portfolio of activities in my home region, North West England. The perfect opportunity came in 1991 with an invitation to me and my department to prepare a strategic plan for the Mersey Estuary, as part of the 25-year Mersey Basin Campaign. The Campaign had been initiated by the prominent UK politician, Michael Heseltine, who argued very persuasively that the economic revival of the North West would never take place unless drastic action was taken to clean up the Mersey and its catchments. The Campaign was a highly successful example of partnership working. I subsequently served as chair, leading the Campaign, and in 2010, as the fourth and final chair, I recommended that the Campaign be brought to a close after 25 years. By this time, it had achieved its original aims and the river could no longer be regarded as the ‘dirty man of Europe’. My involvement with the Mersey continues to this day in my role as Chair of the Mersey Rivers Trust, a new partnership that focuses on environmental improvements across the Mersey catchment.

This, and other activities outside my university, have helped me to develop a concept of what I like to refer to as the ‘useful’ academic who makes a point of first gaining a clear understanding of the practical situation in which she is working and who develops a good two-way relationship with other working partners. It is important to avoid giving the impression that ‘academic knows best’. The skills needed here include political nous and an ability to come up with diplomatic solutions that partners will support.

Finally, it is worth mentioning my roles in university management. Here, as Dean of a Faculty containing all the social sciences and much more besides, I found it helpful to draw on my experience of inter-disciplinary working as a regional scientist to understand the workings of the nine academic departments for which I was responsible. The same applied to my last major role in university management before retirement, as Director of the North West Doctoral Training Centre, a consortium including three universities – Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester –set up to deliver PhD research training to nineteen social science disciplines and inter-disciplinary fields. What might otherwise have been a daunting task was made much more straightforward because, as a regional scientist, I was used to working with fellow academics from a wide range of disciplines.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2018 May)

by Yves Zenou, Department of Economic, Monash University, Australia (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

We are the product of the choices we make but also of the people we meet. This is particularly true for me and for my research interests. Indeed, in August 1987, when I finished my Master’s Degree in Economics and Econometrics at the Université de Paris 10 (Nanterre), I was looking for a possible dissertation topic for a PhD. I had the chance to meet Gerard Ballot, professor at the Université Pantheon-Assas (Paris 2), who suggested that the analysis of spatial labor markets could be an interesting and challenging topic. I decided to embark on this journey, having for sole reference the seminal paper of Harris and Todaro published in American Economic Review in 1970. In my dissertation, I studied the spatial aspects of labor markets, both from theoretical and empirical perspectives. I defended my dissertation in December 1991. I then met Jacques Thisse, professor at CORE in Belgium, who really taught me how to do research. My intellectual debt to him is immense. We wrote several articles together on the theory of local and regional labor markets. Jacques introduced me to Masahisa Fujita and Tony E. Smith, the leaders of the regional science group at the University of Pennsylvania. For me as a junior researcher in 1995, working with Masa and Jacques, two well-established urban economists, was a very challenging experience. I learned a great deal from this collaboration. My meeting with Tony Smith was also decisive. He taught me the rigor of mathematics and the way to prove theorems. Simplicity, kindness, and complexity are certainly good ways of describing Tony. At that time, I also worked with Marcus Berliant who taught me mathematical tools I had never heard of before: differential topology. Diving into the world of general equilibrium with its infinite dimensions and manifolds was a very important experience. It helped me understand the way a general equilibrium is calculated and how one proves its existence and uniqueness. I then collaborated with Jan K. Brueckner who helped me fathom the way to write simple models in order to capture complex economic situations. After having had these different mentors, I was able to work on my own and collaborate with younger researchers.

A large part of my research in Regional Science and Urban Economics has been to study the links between urban economics and labor economics. I believe that many key issues in urban economics can be analyzed in a new and deeper way when the labor market is introduced. In particular, the emergence of urban ghettos and its consequences for the labor-market outcomes of ethnic minorities is difficult to understand if the land and the labor market are not integrated. For example, there is an important empirical literature, revolving around the “spatial mismatch hypothesis”, which states that, because ethnic minorities are physically distant from job opportunities, they are more likely to be unemployed and to obtain low net incomes. Surprisingly, the numerous empirical works which have tried to test the existence of a causal link between spatial mismatch and the adverse labor-market outcomes of minorities are usually not based on any theory. In different papers, I could provide different mechanisms for the spatial mismatch hypothesis. My book, Urban Labor Economics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, summarizes all my contributions to this area of research.

In 1998, while I was actively working on urban-labor-market issues, I had the chance to meet a young researcher, Antoni Calvó-Armengol, who was working on a new field in economics, namely network economics. I had to invest a lot in new mathematical tools, such as graph theory and discrete mathematics, to be able to enter this new area of research. Thanks to him I learned relatively quickly these tools and started to apply them to different aspects of the economy. Indeed, network economics analyses the economy not in isolation, but as part of the social structures that support it. Network economics looks not only at direct interactions between two people, but the ripple effect of interconnected links between their friends, friends-of-friends and so on.

Topics such as crime sound more like sociology than economics. But a crucial difference is that network economics provides a mathematical model to interpret behavior and test relationships, allowing for predictions. Indeed, economics has always struggled to explain crime and that’s exactly the kind of problem network economics is designed to tackle. With Antoni Calvó-Armengol and Coralio Ballester, I have developed a concept called the “key player” that is useful in understanding and targeting criminal networks. Who is the criminal you want to remove from the network so you will reduce total crime the most? We have a mathematical model that can solve this question. To test the key-player idea in the real world, I have worked with the police in Sweden to obtain data on all co-offender criminals. When I asked the police which criminals to target, the answer seemed obvious for them – to cut crime, go after the kingpins. But identifying who these were was not necessarily easy. The police had a lot of data, but no scientific method to sort it with. They tended to concentrate on major groups, such as immigrants, or people with existing criminal records. I took a different approach. Each time two people committed a crime together, I linked them in a graph (co-offender networks). Gradually, I created a network with this information, charting the links and different connections between them all. By doing so, I was able to arrive at ‘key players’ the police should be targeting. When someone is removed I could analyse the impact of those remaining. Key players are the ones that show the biggest impacts. People react: they form new links, or commit more crime. My research shows that targeting key players can reduce crime by 20-30% compared to targeting the most active criminals.

Financial markets are another application. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, I looked at the global banking sector. Here I wanted to answer several questions: in a financial crisis, which institution do you want to bail out, to avoid contagion? How does the risk spread through the balance sheet? And which bank should be allowed to fail? The impact of large key players considered “too big to fail” - such as US investment bank JP Morgan and General Motors – may be obvious, but I wanted to understand much more about the impact smaller players may have on the system. My research showed that the bank you want to bail out is not necessarily the one with the highest market share and profit, but the one with a central position in the network of interbank loans.

I strongly believe that network economics is within the purview of regional science and urban economics. To understand this, let’s go back to the issues mentioned at the beginning of this article, i.e. the study of the labor-market outcomes of ethnic minorities. Clearly, distance to jobs is crucial for understanding why ethnic minorities experience adverse labor market outcomes. But this is not the whole story. There are other elements at stake since even when black workers live close to jobs (e.g. in New York City), they still have problems in finding a job. Social networks are obviously an important part of the story and are not always related to the distance to jobs.

There is indeed strong empirical evidence showing that social networks play an important role in the job search and job finding processes. Individuals seeking jobs read newspapers, go to employment agencies, browse on the web and mobilize their local networks of friends and relatives. In my recent research, I tried to put together urban labor economics and network economics by studying the relationship between non-market interactions (or peer effects and social networks) and urban economics through the labor market. For example, I studied how residential location determines social interactions which, in turn, affect labor market outcomes. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing support in getting a job, I showed that, if minority workers do not have access to weak ties, in particular because they are segregated and separated from business centers, then their main source of information about jobs will be provided by their strong ties, also residing in segregated areas. But if the latter are themselves unemployed, the chance of escaping unemployment will be very low. As a result, a policy aimed at reducing the unemployment of ethnic minorities needs to take into account the fact that they are separated both in the social and the geographical space, and this is what prevents ethnic minorities from finding a job.

In terms of academic career, I have changed countries and moved around a lot. I started as an assistant professor at the Université Pantheon-Assas (in Paris) in 1992, did a post-doc for two years at Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Belgium (1994-1996), became a professor at the Université du Maine, in Le Mans, France, in 1998, then took a professor position at the University of Southampton, UK, from 2000 to 2003. After that, I moved to Stockholm, to be a professor of economics, first at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) and then at Stockholm University. In between, I visited the University of California, Berkeley, for one year (2009-2010). In January 2016, I moved to Melbourne, Australia, and I’m currently a professor of economics and hold the Richard Snape Chair in Business and Economics at Monash University. I have been the co-editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics for the last 10 years (starting in 2007) and have been recently elected Fellow of the Econometric Society (2016), which is rare among regional scientists (only two other RSAI Fellows have received this honour).

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2017 November)

I was born in Istanbul to Greek parents. After an education at Robert Academy, the boys’ American high school on the Bosporus, I was offered a scholarship by Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). I was an intellectual hybrid, trying to balance assertive right and left cerebral hemispheres; one side engaging in drawing and painting and amateurishly trying creative writing; the other, developing a strong interest in geometry, applied mathematics and science. This drama did not end at CMU. I started out in engineering, then transferred to architecture, finally finding a “home” in civil engineering. I wanted to invent a science that would enable the design of a city as a well-functioning social and physical system. But I was quickly humbled by realizing that while cities should be designed for people, unpredictable human behavior necessitated new designs and so on. This led me to economics, a technical enough science of human behavior that made both prediction and prescription possible. At the time, CMU started double degree programs. I graduated with a B.S. in civil engineering and a B.A. in economics. I had also concentrated my electives, putting me a handful of courses short of a degree in philosophy.

Graduate studies at Penn were ideal. Penn allowed an interdisciplinary approach to urban and regional studies with regional science at the center. I was most strongly influenced by Britton Harris. At the end of my first year, I daringly turned down a fellowship offered by Walter Isard, to continue as a research assistant for Britt. Meanwhile, Colin Gannon taught an influential introduction to urban economics at a time when the field was receiving attention from Robert Solow, Avinash Dixit and Edwin Mills (then at nearby Princeton). Alan Wilson and David Pines who visited Penn were also influential.

The monocentric city was the jewel of urban economics. As a student in Colin’s class, I was frustrated by its assumptions: a static model, one dimensional and assuming that all jobs are pinned in the city center. The beauty of economics shone through the model, but the anachronism of the model was disheartening. This tension explains why I took an iconoclastic approach to urban economics. In my dissertation at Penn, I modeled a monocentric city as growing in successive rings, like a tree does, the width of the rings depending on the population added, the income level and other variables in a given time interval. With durable buildings, the model explained rents that rose with distance from the center and possible abandonment of buildings. Later, with Leon Moses at Northwestern, we published a two dimensional version of the monocentric city with public and private transportation competing and producing various land use patterns.

At Penn I discovered two schools of thought on modeling spatial interactions. Alan Wilson at Leeds, a geographer with a background in physics, had developed the macroscopic approach of entropy. Dan McFadden, an economist at Berkeley, was working on a type of econometrics particularly suited for urban studies because it incorporated random heterogeneity in a tractable way. Those who knew both approaches regarded them as inconsistent with one another, but I quickly realized the strong similarity and looked for a synthesis. This resulted in my paper on discrete choice, entropy and the equivalence between multinomial logit and the gravity models.

My true mission as a scholar was the development of computable models of city structure that could be used to make predictions and evaluate policy. Looking back, I have approached this goal systematically and holding myself to strict standards, but perhaps moving a bit too slowly. The standards are: (1) the empirical models should be an implementation of the theory itself preserving cause and effect relationships, not a distortion of the theory; (2) that as much of the available data as possible should be used; (3) that one should avoid over parametrization (a reason I never warmed to spatial econometrics and other descriptive approaches that place more emphasis on errors than on theory.)

My book published in 1982 introduced a multi-centric (as opposed to monocentric) version of location and rent theory based on discrete choice, with the aim of making urban economics empirically and computationally pliable. Using a version of this approach, I forecast how much residential rents near transit stations would change on the planned Southwest Corridor rapid transit line in Chicago. Later, after the Orange line going to Midway was built there, John McDonald and Dan McMillen measured actual rent changes in the Southwest Corridor and concluded that my predictions were accurate. This is the only case of validated prediction that I know in urban economics.

More recently, I have extended the approach to develop the “Regional Economy, Land Use and Transportation (RELU-TRAN)” model, a computable general equilibrium model of an urban economy published in 2007, and I have applied it to Chicago. Articles on the model’s application to Los Angeles and Paris are now in preparation, and there is a European project attempting to apply the model to Amsterdam, Barcelona, Goteborg and Istanbul.

Belief that the science should be applicable has always been the hallmark of my efforts, but I am often frustrated. Modeling cities should be the work of urban economists. They have the best theory of human behavior and of how to allocate resources optimally. Some excellent scholars from other disciplines, notably from geography, urban planning, and transportation, also model cities but with little or no economics. In the real world, such work competes with economics. Meanwhile, the “new urban economics” of the 1970s and 1980s produced much theory, but since the early 1990s there has been a furious flurry of interesting empirical work, adding relatively little to known theory. As such the anachronistic monocentric city is still often used to draw incorrect policy prescriptions. For example, an unregulated congested monocentric city sprawls excessively, but polycentric models such as those I have used show that more urban sprawl is often efficient. It does matter with what tools one looks for the truth.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2017 May)

How does one become a regional scientist?  In my case my high school mathematics teacher in Uithoorn, the Netherlands, recommended that I should study something challenging like econometrics. Not having a strong preference for an alternative discipline, I followed his advice and enrolled in September 1972 in the Interfaculty of Econometrics and Actuarial Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (also referred to as VU University, or Free University Amsterdam). It was a small cohort, as they took in only the 30 best qualified applicants per year. It was called an Interfaculty because students were required to take core courses from the Faculty of Economics and from the Faculty of Science, as well as specialised courses in the Interfaculty itself. Thus, as an undergraduate student I had to struggle with topics like topology, measure theory and abstract algebra. The mathematical models used in undergraduate macroeconomics and microeconomics looked rather simple by comparison.

I started my Masters in Econometrics at VU in January 1975 and had to choose between mathematical economics, econometrics and operations research. A strong interest in public policy led me to mathematical economics, where the work of Nobel Prize winner Jan Tinbergen – who I met when he was visiting VU – still strongly influenced the curriculum. My Masters supervisor Arnold Merkies had previously worked at the Dutch Central Planning Bureau (now called CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis) and offered me a research assistant position in 1976 to update and complete a study he had started at CPB on forecasting the long-run economic growth rate in the Netherlands under assumed scenarios of population growth and post-compulsory education enrolments. This introduced me not only to the economic growth theories at the time (and the inadequacy of the exogenous technological change assumption) but also to population projection methodologies and the use of Markov chains to model transitions. A seminar by Henri Theil, at the University of Chicago at the time, on modelling social mobility further inspired me to go in that direction. The Masters thesis was written in Dutch and sadly not subsequently published, but triggered a job as research assistant of the VU professors of economic growth and macroeconomic policy, Steven Huisman and Bernard Compaijen respectively. With them I contributed to a Dutch macroeconomics textbook.

By late 1978 I decided to do a PhD abroad and a pamphlet on the VU noticeboard advertising a new PhD programme at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in New Zealand led me to apply. While at the opposite side of the world, New Zealand was not an odd choice for me as several of my relatives migrated there in the 1950s and I had visited them and hence knew the country. Additionally, my parents decided to retire there in the same year. VUW offered me a job as junior lecturer, which was financially more attractive than a scholarship offer I received in Australia.  I also met my wife-to-be soon after arriving in Wellington, so that settled the location question.

I decided on a PhD thesis on interregional population mobility, with labour economist Peter Brosnan as chief supervisor. Initially I started applying Markov chain models and could have gone in the direction of Andrei Rogers’ work, but became particularly intrigued by Bill Alonso’s general theory of movements. Formal econometric modelling of this model remained challenging for decades. I did design an estimation method and a New Zealand application, which was published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy (a journal that had a tradition of publishing about labour markets and migration) in 1986.

My introduction to the regional science network was through taking regional, urban and transportation economics as elective courses during my Masters at VU. That is how I met Peter Nijkamp and the late Piet Rietveld. In early 1980 I received a letter “out of the blue” from Peter Nijkamp, jointly with Wal van Lierop, inviting me to participate in a summer institute in Soesterberg, The Netherlands. There I presented my first regional science paper on analysing intra-urban residential mobility with log-linear models. The discussant was Peter Batey.

Roughly at that time I also joined the Australian and New Zealand section of RSAI, which subsequently awarded me with the 1985 best PhD dissertation medal. Like many others in regional science, I continued to be active in other networks as well, in my case the New Zealand Demographic Society (now Population Association of NZ) and the NZ Association of Economists.

Following completion of my doctorate in early 1984, my family and I went on sabbatical back to VU in Amsterdam and to the Australian National University in Canberra. In Amsterdam, I started my first project with Peter Nijkamp on dynamics of generalised spatial interaction models, subsequently published in 1987 Regional Science and Urban Economics. My first presentation of this paper was at the 1985 PRSCO conference on Molokai, Hawaii, with Walter Isard as the discussant. Walter liked the paper – which was a pure theory one – and told me not to be concerned when some New Zealand colleagues had criticized the paper for having little practical use.

In the second half of the 1980s, I got my first large grant from the NZ government. The aim was to do a scenario-based impact assessment of immigration by means of simulations with a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model.   For this, I worked with VUW’s Bryan Philpott, who had developed several CGE models for New Zealand, and his PhD student Ganesh Nana. At that time Australia and New Zealand were well ahead of North America and Europe in doing integrated impact assessment of international migration. Many of the issues that became subsequently core topics of immigration economics (such as the role of international trade, fiscal impacts, housing, technological change and population diversity) were already introduced in our 1988 book International Migration and the New Zealand Economy.

At the same time I continued working with Peter Nijkamp, and also with Jan Rouwendal, on endogenous economic growth in a spatial setting, leading to several articles in Annals of Regional Science and also one in Australian Economic Papers.

In 1994 I was offered an opportunity to spend a few years in Japan at the University of Tsukuba, on the invitation of former RSAI President and 1996 World Congress organiser Hirotada Kohno. During this time in Japan I also worked closely with the more recent RSAI President Yoshiro Higano. While my teaching in Japan introduced me to the challenges of environmental economics and policy, my research remained focussed on the economics of migration and endogenous growth. Upon returning to New Zealand in 1997 (VUW had graciously kept my position open), my VUW colleague Philip Morrison and I organised the December 1997 PRSCO conference in Wellington which attracted 250 participants from throughout the world.

After Peter Nijkamp won the 1996 Spinoza Prize, he used the funds to set up MASTER-point at VU University, a research centre for meta-analysis in spatial, transportation and environmental research and invited me to join MASTER-point as a visiting professor. Raymond Florax was appointed as director. Meta-analysis, the quantitative research synthesis of a body of empirical research findings, had become very popular in other disciplines such as psychology, medicine and education, but had received relatively little attention in economics. This association with MASTER-point during the late 1990s and early 2000s turned out to be a very productive period and led to highly cited publications. One topic was the labour market impacts of immigration, to which Simonetta Longhi, who was doing her PhD at VU at the time, made a major contribution.

In 2004 I took up, upon the invitation of New Zealand’s demographer par excellence, Ian Pool, a personal chair in population economics at the University of Waikato and the Directorship of the Population Studies Centre. We were very fortunate to secure during the following decade some large grants for research on population ageing, immigrant integration and regional population distribution in New Zealand that allowed participation of around 6-10 researchers. After a three year-stint as Director, I was happy to pass on that administrative role to my colleague Richard Bedford, who subsequently transformed PSC into the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA), where I am at present.

As co-Principal Investigator of the 2009-2013 Migrant Diversity and Regional Disparity in Europe (MIDI-REDIE) project and having several other professional roles and projects in Europe as well, I became during the last decade one of the world’s longest distance commuters – spending several months in Europe each year, as well as continuing the New Zealand projects. Given that a lot of my work had been concerned with economic policy analysis, I was very honoured to win the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) Award in 2013, referred to by the NZ public as “Economist of the Year”.

In recent years I have been doing further meta-analyses, including with Henri de Groot and Martijn Smit on agglomeration externalities (with the latest paper recently published in Journal of Economic Surveys) and with former VU PhD student Ceren Ozgen (now at the University of Birmingham) on productivity effects of net migration (in Papers in Regional Science). Work with Ceren also included several projects on trying to find causal evidence of diversity impacts on innovation.

It is clearly impossible to mention all research collaborators around the globe since the turn of the millennium, but I should acknowledge many interesting projects with former Waikato PhD students Bill Cochrane, Matt Roskruge, Valente Matlaba, Steven Bond-Smith and Lynda Sanderson (I should explicitly mention the paper with Lynda and Phil McCann on relationship capital published in Journal of Economic Geography, of which I am particularly fond), with former VU PhD students Masood Gheasi and Guney Celbis; and with former Purdue PhD student Julia Beckhusen.  Several of the New Zealand projects are jointly with Senior Fellows Dave Maré and Arthur Grimes at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, New Zealand’s leading economic think-tank.

The European work on the economics of cultural diversity triggered a 2014-2020 mixed methods project in New Zealand, entitled Capturing the Diversity Dividend of Aotearoa New Zealand (CaDDANZ, pronounced cadence). Research on diversity impacts, immigrant integration and social capital development is likely to remain the main focus of my research in years to come, but new projects on the challenges of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, and on the future of smaller urban areas are on the horizon. This, combined with having accepted the Presidency of RSAI over the next two years, implies there is no shortage of interesting and challenging things to do in the years to come.

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2016 November)