Sustainable Urban and Regional Development Conference: Research and Policy for the Asia Pacific Rim

December 7-9, 2018

Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, China

This international conference is hosted by the Governments of Zhaoqing, China, Guangzhou Province, Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, and The Regional Science Academy (TRSA). Zhaoqing, the host of the conference, is a city located in the Pearl River Delta about 40 miles upstream from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. The Pearl River Delta has nearly 100 million residents and is one of the top three economically productive regions in China. It offers the right environment for an international gathering on sustainable spatial development. We are seeking participants who would like to present a paper at the Conference.

This is the second conference hosted by this group, with the first conference held at and hosted by Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2017. Some 150 papers were presented at the first conference and a selection of these contributions formed the contents for a special edition in one of the top regional science journals. At the forthcoming conference in December 2018, authors from several Pacific Rim Countries including from North and South America and Europe as well, and of course, from China and nearby countries will attend and present papers centering on the above theme. We expect about 200+ attendees this year.

Those wishing to present a paper should contact: Roger R. Stough, Vice President TRSA, Peter Nijkamp, Vice President TRSA, or Karima Kourtit, Executive Director TRSA, at one of the following email addresses.

Roger R. Stough This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Peter Nijkamp  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Karima Kourtit This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Assistant Professor Position – Urban Inequality & Health Disparities – Department of Geography

The Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenured or tenure-track faculty position at the level of Assistant Professor with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2019. The Department is looking for exceptional individuals with particular emphasis in the area of urban inequality and health disparities. Urban social inequalities are observed at the individual, relationship/network, community/neighborhood, and societal levels, and are embedded in life course dynamics. The successful candidate will have research and teaching expertise on the social and structural determinants and/or observable manifestations of urban inequality at any of these levels. Topics could include, but are not limited to, disparities in health, income, transportation, or residence relating to race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, or other characteristics. We are particularly interested in researchers using innovative theory and quantitative methods that account for social and spatial context. Applicants with perspectives from public health, demography, sociology, or other related fields in addition to geography are encouraged to apply. The University is especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through research, teaching and service as appropriate to the position. Applications received by December 1, 2018 will be given priority consideration, but the position will remain open until filled.  To apply please visit https://recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/apply/JPF01334.

The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Call for Special Session proposals

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..
You can object to the processing of your data at any time. It is sufficient to send an e-mail to the following address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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.
Your data may be transferred only to entities that have a legal basis for receiving such information. Since 25 May 2018, the legal basis for the processing of personal data contained in the database of people using marketing and commercial information has been Art. 6 (1) f of the Regulation(EU) 2016/679of the European Parliamentand of the Councilof 27 April 2016on the protectionof natural personswith regardto the processingpersonal dataand on the free movementof such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC/(the General Data Protection Regulation), 
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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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Akademia WSB (WSB University) ul. Cieplaka 1C, 41-300 Dąbrowa Górnicza NIP (Taxpayer ID no.): 629-10- 88-993, REGON (Business ID no.): 272653903
Phone: +48 32 262-28-05, +48 32 262-03-07, Fax: +48 32 295-93-44, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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)