Professor Emeritus Börje Johansson passed away in his home in Stockholm, Sweden, June 18, 2020, at the age of 74. Börje served as President of the European Regional Science Association 2000-2003. In 2013 he was awarded the EIB-ERSA Prize for his great contributions to regional science. From 1994 and 20 years onwards, he served as Editor for the Annals of Regional Science. He always stood out as a great beacon of regional science from the North.

Börje Johansson took his PhD in Economics at Gothenburg University 1978. 1982-1984 he was Acting Leader of the Integrated Regional & Urban Development Group (RUD) at IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria. 1985 he became Director of CERUM (Centre for Regional Science Research), University of Umeå. 1994 he was appointed Professor of Economics at JIBS (Jönköping International Business School), Jönköping, Sweden, a position that he kept until his retirement a few years ago. Börje also held positions as Professor in Economics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, and as Guest Professor in Infrastructure Economics at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden.

Börje’s research interests spanned over large areas of economics and regional science. He made important contributions to economic network theory and productivity analysis. He was an excellent teacher and fostered a new generation of PhD students wherever he was active. Börje also had an extraordinary ability to apply his theoretical knowledge to practical problems, and he had innumerable commissions for agencies and authorities at national and regional levels. He was always hard working and had an extraordinary scholarly and personal integrity combined with a terse sense of humour inherited from his family background in the coastal surroundings of Gothenburg.

Börje is mourned and missed by many colleagues and friends across the world, most of all by his children Eleanor, Eskil and Olof.

Hans Westlund                    Folke Snickars                    Charlie Karlsson

Professor                            Professor Emeritus              Professor Emeritus

Postdoc Opportunity: 

The Department of Social and Political Science at the University of Milan is looking to seeking to recruit a post-doctoral researcher. The position is fully funded for two years and can be renewed for a further two years.

The researcher will work directly with Professor Anne-Marie Jeannet on her ERC funded project DESPO “Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences.” The aim of this project is to reveal how a person’s individual, family, and local community experiences of manufacturing decline transform the way they participate in politics and their political attitudes over the course of their life. DESPO will focus on the long-term consequences by five decades of manufacturing decline and its political aftermath (1965-2015).

The ideal applicant will be a skilled quantitative researcher that has demonstrated experience working with administrative data, managing large datasets, and data linking. He/she should also have a strong competence in geographic software (GIS), statistical software (STATA or R), and preparing documents in LaTeX. A preference will be giving to candidates who have demonstrated interest in working class politics, electoral realignment, or economic restructuring. The position is in English and knowledge of Italian is NOT required. 

The position is open to candidates with a PhD with various social science backgrounds such as: sociology, political science, geography, economics, history, or similar disciplines.

The application deadline is July 8, 2020.The starting date for the position is September 1 (negotiable). Application info is available here:  https://www.unimi.it/it/ricerca/ricerca-lastatale/fare-ricerca-da-noi/assegni-e-borse/bandi-assegni-di-ricerca/bando-di-tipo-b-prof-chiesi-dottssa-jeannet-id-4616

Please feel free to contact Anne-Marie Jeannet (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) for any informal inquiries regarding the application process or the position.

Regional Science and Tourism in the Era of Global Uncertainty

(NECTAR Special Session in North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International RSAI 2020)

NECTAR Clusters 5-6 Special Session

San Diego, CA, USA November 11-14, 2020

Call for papers

As part of the Annual Meetings of 2020 North American Regional Science Council (NARSC) in San Diego, CA from November 11 to 14, 2020, we would like to invite you to special session(s) for “Tourism and Regional Science in the Era of Global Uncertainty” that Nectar clusters 5 and 6 are organizing jointly with the NARSC and RSAI.

The website for submission is now open in the User Area of NARSC website (https://www.narsc.org/newsite/userarea/UserArea.php). Short abstracts as well as full papers (also in draft format) will be accepted for the Special Session.

If you are interested in presenting your research in this special session, please submit an abstract (2,000 to 5,500 characters and spaces) through the conference portal. Information on how to do that can be found here. Upon submitting your abstract, you will receive an abstract ID number (e.g. P12345). Please send your abstract ID number and a copy of your abstract to Jaewon Lim, University of Nevada Las Vegas, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Juan Carlos Martin, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and Luca Zamparini, University of Salento,   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. no later than June 30, 2020.

Selected full papers will be invited for publication in a special issue of the Regional Science Policy & Practice Journal, following standard review/revision procedures. (https://rsaiconnect.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17577802).

Main topic

Christaller (1964) was probably one of the first regional scientists who analysed, after the conference held in Lund during 1963, the patterns on geographical location of tourist activity. Christaller found that “It is typical for places of tourism to be on the periphery. In this way, regions economically benefit from factors which cannot be utilized otherwise: high mountain chains, barren, rocky landscapes, heather, unproductive dunes.” (p.86). Since then, the tourism industry has changed dramatically. It is not so much the activity to move away from each other but instead to be with each other visiting their places and new places, also being involved with tourists in our own places because the we, and the places we live, are nice. That is why regional science – the study of human interaction within space with sound methods – has a say that can change the scientific perspectives on tourism that often miss space and the relation with each other. Regional Science as a discipline needs to analyse multiple strategies, policies and trends that are critical for tourist destinations that aspire to position and to consolidate their image in the world-wide network of tourist destinations at different geographical levels, urban or rural, within a framework of tough global competition. However, as world is currently experiencing, the unexpected events including but not limited to pandemic contagious diseases, regional political instabilities, safety issues with terrorist attacks, make the future of tourism uncertain. Due to the increasing concerns for mobility across space with the growing global uncertainty, tourism activities are expected to get downward pressure, while the increasing demand for various types of experience in tourism destinations may boost the worldwide growth of tourism in the future.

For this reason, potential topics discussed at the Special Session include:

• How can tourism studies benefit from Regional Science?

• Quantitative methods of Regional Science applied to Tourism

• Pandemic Diseases and Tourism Industry

• Consumer Behavior & Tourism Analysis

• From Well-Being and Happiness of tourists to Quality of Life of host residents.

• New Directions and Paradigms in Regional Science applied to Tourism

• From Decision Making to Travel Behavior

• Regional Science and Hospitality Research. The notion of industrial clusters.

• Tourism Infrastructure. Natural and Cultural Endowments

• Tourism Flows. Place, Time and Activities

• National and Regional Tourism and Travel Competitiveness

• Tourism Trends. Climate Change and Sustainable Tourism

• Tourism Demand: Demographic, Behavioral and Social Changes.

The abstracts/papers will be reviewed by the Organizing Committee and the notification of paper acceptance will be distributed by July 15th, 2020.

Organizing committee. For more information or questions please contact Jaewon Lim, University of Nevada Las Vegas (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Tomaz Dentinho, University of the Azores (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.): Juan Carlos Martin, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and Luca Zamparini, University of Salento, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

NECTAR is a European-based scientific association. The primary objective is to foster research collaboration and exchange of information between experts in  the field  of transport, communication and mobility from all European countries and the rest of the world. It is a multidisciplinary social science network. It brings together a wide variety of perspectives on transport and communication problems and their impacts on society in an international perspective. For further information see: http://www.nectar-eu.eu

Volume 46 of Investigaciones Regionales-Journal or Regional Research is published under the form of a Special Issue devoted to the analysis of “Linkages and channels between Cohesion Policy and European Identity”. The volume has been coordinated by Professors Jordi Suriñach (Universitat de Barcelona) and Edoardo Mollona (Università di Bologna) and is associated with the results of the European H2020 project named PERCEIVE, being six papers related to this project, while a seventh work, the one signed by Giovanni Perucca, is associated to another EU-funded project – COHESIFY, with similar objectives and perspectives.

This issue consists of an editorial and seven other research articles. In the Editorial, the coordinators of the volume describe the search of a main better understanding of the channels through which European policies contribute to create both different local understandings of the EU and different levels of European identification across profoundly different European regions. The papers presented in this special issue display the multidisciplinary portfolio of competences and analytical methods to elicit the meaning structures in public discourse about the EU. The papers mobilize two theoretical perspectives: a rational choice and a social constructivist perspective. The former puts forward an idea of institutions as “rules of the game” and that emphasizes the calculative rationality of actors as determinants of European identities and identification, while the second stresses the idea that European identities and identification emerge from a process of “social learning” associated with different institutional discourses.

The first paper opens the special issue and report empirical research to describe the general features of the phenomena under investigation. In the paper Do Citizens Support Cohesion Policy? Measuring European support for redistribution within the EU and its correlates, Nicholas Charron presents the results of a survey that investigates how citizens feel about economic integration within the Union and what attitudes they have towards cohesion policy. Grounding on 17,200 interviews to European citizens, the survey shows the variation in citizens’ support for EU Cohesion policy between countries and describes how support varies between demographic groups. To speculate on the relative exploratory power of rational versus cultural approaches, the survey studies as well as the extent to which utilitarian and ideational factors underpin support.

The paper written by Rosina Moreno, EU Cohesion Policy Performance: Regional Variation in the Effectiveness of the management of the Structural Funds, investigates the dynamics of absorption of EU cohesion funds at NUTS2 level. The effectiveness in the absorption of funds is a crucial challenge for EU member states and this article takes an original perspective by focusing on the regional variation in the absorption of the structural funds. A dimension, this latter, that has been overlooked in previous literature. The paper suggests that full absorption is more the exception than the rule and high regional heterogeneity in the absorption of the Structural Funds is not only observed across countries but also within the regions in a country.

A review of the theoretical arguments that explain the process of creation of a European identity is provided in the article written by Vicente Royuela and Enrique López-Bazo, Understanding the process of creation of European identity – the role of Cohesion Policy. In the article, the authors discuss the grounds of mechanisms and determinants driving citizens’ identification with Europe, stressing the role of the territorial dimension on European identity formation. The authors analyse the main theoretical arguments on the construction of European identity. They also analyse the role of Cohesion Policy by confronting the concepts of spatial identities with a historical perspective of the European project. Finally, they inspects the role of European institutions by providing some basic figures on the regional expenditure on Structural Funds and its association with the awareness, support and identification with the EU project

In their paper, Profiling identification with Europe and the EU project in the European regions Cristina Brasili, Pinuccia Calia and Irene Monasterolo investigate to what extent do EU citizens identify with Europe and the EU project, whether European regions have different patterns and level of identification and what, if any, is the role of socio-economic variables. The authors develop a novel probabilistic classification model, IdentEU, and use micro-level data from a survey implemented within the PERCEIVE project. The reported empirical research reveals that trust in the EU institutions, the effectiveness of EU Cohesion Policy and spending, and the level of corruption are three relevant drivers of citizens’ identification with the European project.

To conclude the group of papers addressing the formation of EU identity, the paper by Giovanni Perucca. When Country Matters More than Europe: What Implications for the Future of the EU? studies the determinants of the imbalance between the identification of a citizen’s with her/his country, on the one hand, and with Europe on the other. The work reported in the paper moves off from noting how recent empirical evidence shows an increasing imbalance in favor of the identification with individuals’ country of residence. This phenomenon, the author suggests, may be connected with the increasing support to nationalisms and Eurosceptic parties almost everywhere in the EU. The results presented, based on a panel data model using data from five Eurobarometer survey studies conducted between 2014 and 2017, suggest that individuals with lower education and income, and those living in the lagging-behind regions of the EU, are more likely to identify more with their own country than with Europe. Thus, the paper supports the hypothesis that unequal distribution (among individuals and regions) of the benefits from EU integration is a determinant worth considering of the emerging antagonism between European and national identity. 

A second thread of investigation reported in this special issue addresses whether and how the communication strategies of Cohesion policy affect the perception of the policy and the identification with the EU.

In their paper, Luca Pareschi, Edoardo Mollona, Vitaliano Barberio and Ines Kuric (The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere)  analyze cohesion policy communication on social media of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) that manage structural funds at the local level and communicate to stakeholders information concerning Cohesion Policy. The authors use semi-automatic text analysis techniques to elicit shared meaning structures as they emerge in the discussion on social media. The aim is to understand whether an European public-sphere exists in which a shared EU identity can emerge. The reported results show the emergence of an internationally articulated cluster of topics that showcase a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme and a generally skeptic attitude towards the Europe Union. This fact suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate, and be inflated, the emergence of a European public sphere.

The paper by Giovanni Cunico, Eirini Aivazidou and Edoardo Mollona (European Cohesion Policy performance and citizens’ awareness: A holistic System Dynamics framework) integrates the analysis of implementation and communication. Namely, based on the interviews to policy-makers, stakeholders and beneficiaries of cohesion policy, the paper develops a holistic qualitative framework that elicits the causal structure underpinning the distribution of the Cohesion Policy funds, the impact on projects’ quality of the management capability at local managing authority level, and the related, communication processes. The authors developed the qualitative causal model with the aim at stimulating a focused discussion on Cohesion Policy. The motivation behind this modelling effort is to provide policy-makers, stakeholders and scholars interested in Cohesion Policy analysis with a conceptual tool able to elicit the interconnections among the key processes at work and, more specifically, between the dynamics of funds absorption, policy communication and the mechanisms that produce awareness about the policy.

This issue has been sponsored by the Directorate General of Community Funds and co-financed by the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund).

MAPS AND ATLASES always fascinated me as a child, even if I would have loved (and still do!) to be an English/Dutch schoolteacher! I chose geography instead of philology because I perceived very early that geography was a science at the crossroad of many other disciplines, not too specialized but challenging enough and dealing with societal and environmental issues … and foreign languages could also be useful! I now think that I took the right decision!

From the very beginning of my research career, I was oriented to quantitative analyses and modelling by my promoter/supervisor Hubert Beguin. He almost forced me to do a PhD and decided for me that it would deal with optimal locations, using operational research models and applying them to real-world situations (in my case post-offices). This was quite novel at that time.

After a fruitful Post-doc period, there was unfortunately no academic positions available that were compatible with my family constraints so I left the university for a quite unusual and challenging position: scientific collaborator at the Gendarmerie Headquarters (Brussels). We were a team of two geographers hired as civilians to work in a military environment, two women in a work environment where officers were still men only: an adventure! Our mission: to provide support with geostatistical tools, maps and models. I was in charge of road accidents, my colleague of criminality. Where do accidents occur? Why there? What is the best location of police patrols? What is the optimal partitioning for police districts? This was a period where I learned how to use geospatial techniques or models, and present their results in layman’s terms, showing the usefulness of geography in operational decision making. I think most academics would gain from working for a while out of the academic world: such an experience helps enormously in teaching or in writing multidisciplinary research projects.

After this unconventional experience, I came back to university with a FNRS permanent research position at the Department of Geography in Louvain-la- Neuve (Be) where I mainly conducted research in economic and transport geography, and additionally taught several courses such as statistical cartography, transport or economic geography and gave tutorials on thesis preparation. I also wrote a second doctoral dissertation on the sensitivity of location-allocation models to transportation issues. I later moved to the Center of Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), an internationally well-known scientific research centre, where I was the only geographer among mainly economists, operational researchers and engineers.

Now more than ever I feel rich and stronger for those multidisciplinary research experiences. I’ve particularly appreciated to work at the border of my discipline. I’ve engaged with very nice and openminded researchers with whom I have exchanged ideas and published. Not only geographers of other universities/ countries, but also economists, physicists, engineers, epidemiologists and medical doctors. Constructing a scientific project or publishing together is for sure not an easy task: we think differently, we’ve other priorities, we refer to other models/theories, and even write our scientific papers differently. But what satisfaction when we succeed in respecting each other, taking advantage of our complementarities, constructing new ideas and realizing in fact that we deal with the same questions but with different words, tools or theories.

Quantitative geography has a great future especially in regional sciences. Geography has always dealt with locations, large data sets or nested scales and has accumulated knowledge, even if geographers are often shy in putting this forward. Geography is hence now more than ever ready to deal with topics such as complexities or “big data”. Small or big, new data types appear every day: sensors become censors in the new smart environments. Geographers know better than any other researcher that spatial data are special… Big data do not change fundamentally the problems; there is no need to reinvent the wheel: aggregation biases, close things are more related than distant things, statistical biases, etc. It seems that nowadays I too frequently read papers that simply let the data speak by themselves, without any caution. I hope to have time in the coming years to further work on these topics, to fight with geographical tools against data bulimia and theory anorexia, to help machine learning researchers in further constructing meaningful models that do not reinvent geography but push forward their results into further models and theories.

I’m so happy and proud as a geographer to be awarded the RSAI Fellowship. I never aimed for it, but it happened in 2019 (pictured on the left, with prof. Partridge). I’m simply enjoying the moment!

Isabelle Thomas

Research Director at the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) Extraordinary Professor, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2020 May)

Please find enclosed (below) a call for application for a 15-month postdoctoral position in economics entitled “Performance of water supply services and multi-objective asset management: contribution of the cost-benefit analysis” offered by INRAE, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, ETBX research unit.

The position is based in Cestas, France. The expected starting period is September 1, 2020.

Deadline for application: 19th July 2020.

THE NEW ISSUE OF REGIONAL STATISTICS IS ALREADY AVAILABLE!

We are pleased to inform you that a new issue of the Regional Statistics has been released and now it’s avaiable online.

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/eterstat2001.pdf

REGIONAL STATISTICS, 2020, VOL 10, No 1.

STUDIES

Trianon memorial issue

Zoltán Hajdú: Structural and administrative implications of the Trianon Peace Treaty, 1920

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100103.pdf

Gábor Demeter: Estimating regional inequalities in the Carpathian Basin – Historical origins and recent outcomes  (1880–2010)

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100105.pdf

János Pénzes: The impact of the Trianon Peace Treaty on the border zones – an attempt to analyse the historic territorial

development pattern and its changes in Hungary 

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100102.pdf

Béla Tomka: The economic consequences  of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon for Hungary

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100101.pdf

Ferenc Szilágyi– Tibor Elekes: Changes in administration, spatial structure, and demography in the Partium region since 

the Treaty of Trianon

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100104.pdf

Tibor Elekes– Ferenc Szilágyi: Administrative, spatial and demographic changes  in Székelyland since the Treaty of Trianon  to the present day

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100107.pdf

Sándor Kókai.: How the Trianon Peace Treaty impeded social and spatial structure progress in the Bánság (1918–2010)

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100108.pdf

VISUALIZATIONS

András Bereznay: Trianon: self-defeating self-determination

http://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xftp/terstat/2020/rs100106.pdf

Join us to our social networking sites:

https://www.facebook.com/RegionalStatistics

https://ksh.academia.edu/RegionalStatistics

RSPP Call for Papers

Special Issue on Modelling place attractiveness in the era of Big and Open data

From hedonic house price models on micro-scales to estimations of regional economic resilience on the macro-level, an understanding of the spatial distribution of amenities and the local composition of neighbours and jobs is of key importance. Some of the amenities or attributes that are commonly used in house price modelling, such as quality of housing, job- accessibility as well as proximity to railway stations or nature are relatively easy to measure and integrate in an empirical modelling framework. Factors relating to perceptions about neighbourhood characteristics, status or even architecture may be far more difficult to account for in a satisfactory way. Moreover neighbourhood characteristics, amenities and prices are partly linked by circular causation.

In recent years, an increasing amount of spatio-temporal data have been made publically and openly available for research, particularly in online map-databases and through API: s. This development enables researchers to connect weather, transport schedules, and detailed geocoded databases listing a wide range of amenities to data on urban form, street-networks and housing. The new data sources enable us to reformulate the way we measure and use amenities in econometric models.

In this call we invite presentations that problematize and develop methods and theories that can be used to better understand and define amenities in studies of housing markets or place attractiveness.

We specifically invite papers that address questions relating to:

• Combining hedonic price house price models and spatial analysis
• The study of temporal variations, including yearly, seasonal and diurnal patterns, of availability and attraction of amenities
• Theory and methods for the measure of accessibility to green and blue resources using spatial analysis and GIS
• Enriching models on mezzo- and macro-scales using disaggregate spatial and temporal data for the creation of variables.
• The use of international resources and classifications of data that could be integrated in comparative modelling.
• Usage of data from demographic and socio-economic micro-data registers, and the creation of bespoke neighbour statistics.
• Usage of Big data, smart data and qualitative methods
• Integrating mobility and the ambient population in measures of place attractiveness
• Architecture, space syntax, and urban form – what are the connections between the spatial form of the urban landscape and place attraction?
• The modelling of causal impacts rather than correlations, as well as of endogenous amenities
• Modelling approaches focusing on location choice and selection processes in view of idiosyncratic amenities.

Interested scholars are encouraged to submit an article in the platform of Regional Science Policy and Practice (https://rsaiconnect.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17577802) until September 12, 2020. The papers will be on-line after accepted by a blind peer review process. The accepted paper will be compiled in a special issue.

Editors: John Östh (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Umut Türk and Jie Huang

RSPP Call for Papers on

Understanding the Spatial Dynamics of Social Unrest

According to Albert Hirschman (1970) when people or places perceive decreases in their quality of life they can respond in a number of ways. Individuals can take no action, stay and advocate for change, or exit and move to another place (Hoffmann, 2008). The exit of people, although worthy of ongoing study, has received profound treatment in migration studies. The exit of places through secession has been an interesting topic for regional science (McCann, 2018; Suriñach and Dentinho, 2019). The voice of populist or discontent voters has gained traction and is getting increased attention (Van-Leeuwen & Halleck-Vega, 2020).

There is a regional science literature on Social Unrest. Glaeser and Di Pasquali (1998), on the Los Angeles Social Unrest of 1992, used different explanatory variables, finding ethnic diversity, but not poverty, to be important. Collins and Margo (2007) analysed the negative consequences of Social Unrest on real estate values, demonstrating that it is better to take no action than to be protester. While protests may start in a particular place, they can quickly diffuse to other parts of a city or country, or even internationally.

To better comprehend protests it is important to get an improved understanding of the perceived spatial and social dysfunctions that ignite and fuel them, and result in them occurring in particular places at particular moments in time. Recently, we have witnessed protests in Baghdad, Paris, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Quito, Caracas, and the United States. In recent years, it seems that protests have not only become more frequent but damages they inflict have become much more considerable (Yeo, 2019).

The aim of this Call for Papers is to understand the spatial conditions that ignite protests and the spatial impacts of these events.

Interested scholars are encouraged to submit an article in the platform of Regional Science Policy and Practice (https://rsaiconnect.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17577802) until November 22, 2020. The papers will be on-line after accepted by a blind peer review process.  

The RSPP Editorial Team

Call for Papers: “The potential of small-scale spatial data’’
Special Issue of the Review of Regional Research

Guest editors: Rolf Bergs (PRAC Bergs & Issa Partnership Co.) and Rüdiger Budde (RWI-Leibniz-Institute for Economic Research)

A major constraint in spatial analysis has been the information deficit at small-scale spatial level. The use of official area-wide regional data, as provided by Destatis, Eurostat or others, is hampered by the fact that these data, being resolved at NUTS 2 or NUTS 3 level, are too coarse to allow sufficiently precise estimates of certain relationships and impacts or a truly functional classification of space. This has often hampered policy to conclude with targeted interventions into the economy, social affairs, the labour market or the environment.

Since around 2010 the improved provision of small-scale data at neighbourhood level, grid data at one square kilometre resolution or satellite data at a resolution of few hectares has opened doors to stronger empirical precision. Meanwhile, many EU countries grant free access to grid data on population density. In some Nordic countries, further differentiated datasets at grid or small-scale level are available. In Germany, commercial data sets with certain socio-economic contents now supplement official statistics. In addition, there is ubiquitous free access to various sorts of satellite imagery such as e.g. VIIRS (14-bit night satellite images with rich socio-economic and environmental information). Those data processed with novel sophisticated spatial analysis methods, such as supervised or unsupervised spatial clustering or advanced spatial econometrics may largely contribute to evidence-based policy in various fields.

This special issue is intended to contribute to the required knowledge base and to provide new evidence on the advantages of small-scale spatial or grid data. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
• Generation of small-scale neighbourhood and grid data
• Relevant statistical and econometric methods
• Functional segmentation of space
• Spatial heterogeneity and dependence
• Spatial interaction (e.g. rural-urban)
• Cross-sectional neighbourhood effects (education, health, labour market, investment, environment, living, wealth)
• Policy impact estimated with small-scale spatial data
• Epidemiological research of space

Submission via Editorial Manager opens 1 November 2020 and closes 31 March 2021

Expected publication: August 2022

Literature

Dubé, J, Legros, D (2014) Spatial Econometrics using Microdata, London and Hoboken: Iste and Wiley

Fernández-Vázquez E, Rubiera Morillon F (2012) Defining the Spatial Scale in Modern Regional Analysis: New Challenges from Data at Local Level. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer

van Ham M (2012) Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer

Zhang J, Atkinson PM, Goodchild MF (2014) Scale in Spatial Information and Analysis, Boca Raton: CRC Press