Place and Time: The Right Place at the Right Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2012 November)

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

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

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

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

Alan Wilson (centre) with colleagues, early 1970s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2012 May)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technologies and Cities

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

Transportation, Land Use and Infrastructure Protection

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

International Planning

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2011 November)

Manfred Fisher, University of Vienna, Austria

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

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2011 June)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2010 November)

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2010 June)

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

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

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2009 October)

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

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

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

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

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

(Published on RSAI Newsletter 2009 March)

Building bridges in regional science

2025 and 2026 conference participation support

The RSAI facilitates the participation of researchers from low-income and lower-middle-income economies (as defined by the World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/about/country-and-lending-groups#Low_income) at the RSAI World Congress 2026, and the three largest Regional Science Conferences in 2025 and 2026: PRSCO, ERSA and NARSC.

RSAI will provide a subsidy up to USD 500 (or the equivalent in other currencies) to selected researchers. This is likely to cover the conference registration fee and some local travel costs. Alternative means of financing will have to be sought for international travel and accommodation.

Only one author of a submitted paper presentation proposal can apply for a subsidy.

Interested researchers should upload a two-page CV plus a one-page motivation –including a budget with proposed sources of funding of the conference-related registration, travel and accommodation costs – within 30 days of receiving confirmation of the acceptance of the researcher’s abstract by the conference organizers.

Applicants should be regular members of the RSAI, and have had a paper accepted for presentation at the conference.

All applications, to be submitted at the following link:

https://forms.gle/G57Q983dAUK7aV9Z8

will be reviewed by the Committee and will have to be formally approved by the RSAI Council. Their decision will be final.

The North American Regional Science Council (NARSC) promotes the scholarly exchange of ideas and knowledge that apply to urban and regional phenomena in North America and across the globe.

The association fosters exchange across academic disciplines and builds on the understanding that urban and regional issues are best addressed by utilizing tools, methods, and theoretical frameworks specifically designed for regional analysis, as well as concepts, procedures, and analytical techniques of the various social and other sciences.

The association organizes an annual national conference that provides a forum for interaction and discussion, and sponsors scholarly regional science journals for the dissemination of research and ideas. NARSC is an objective, scientific body without political, social, financial, or nationalistic bias.