Gordon Mulligan lunching in Squamish, B.C., in 2010 with WRSA's 52nd President, Warren Gill
The Western Regional Science Association is deeply saddened by the loss of Professor Gordon F. Mulligan, who passed away at home in British Columbia on November 12, 2023, after a short period of hospice care. Gordon lived a week and day past his 76th birthday, having been born on November 4, 1947.
Growing up in the company-owned mill town of Woodfibre, British Columbia, accessible to the outside world only by boat, Gordon's wide-ranging polymath attributes and mathematical acumen became apparent at an early age. He attended Howe Sound Secondary in the nearby central place of Squamish, B.C., where he excelled in both academics and sports.
As an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia (UBC) beginning in the mid-1960s, Gordon discovered the focus of his scholarly interests, economic geography and mathematical models, as well as a passion for academia. He loved UBC so much that he spent a full decade there. He produced a 1972 M.A. thesis, City Size Distributions: Foundations of Analysis, and a 1976 Ph.D. dissertation, Structure and Processes in the Christallerian System, that set the stage for a distinguished and prolific career in regional science. Following a pair of visiting positions at the University of Washington and Queens University, Gordon joined the faculty of the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1978, where he taught until he retired in 2006.
Throughout his time in Arizona, Gordon remained personally connected to small-town British Columbia, returning each summer to visit his parents. The Woodfibre pulp mill, where his father had worked until shortly before his death and Gordon had held summer jobs, was closed by its owner, Western Forest Products, in 2006. The mill and townsite were razed and put up for sale. Today it is the location of Woodfibre Liquid Natural Gas, a large hydroelectric-powered facility. Its parent company plans to open it in 2027 to supply growing markets in Asia, touting the environmental benefits of displacing coal and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Post-retirement, Gordon moved back up to Squamish, where he kept up an active agenda as an independent scholar and continued on as Book Review editor of the WRSA's official journal, The Annals of Regional Science. An avid movie buff, he was also extremely well-read in fiction and literature. He segued from his long-time University of Arizona faculty-staff bowling career into throwing the rock on a senior curling team, and, as part of providing care for his aging mother, he no doubt raised the level of play of her bridge group.
Gordon's theoretical and empirical research contributions to regional science directly reflected the locational circumstances of his upbringing. He listed his disciplines on ResearchGate as Transport Economics, Real Estate Economics, and Economic Geography, and among his skills and expertise, Regional Development, Regional Science, Regional and Urban Economics, Cities, and Place. The faculty group he joined in 1978 at Arizona was the last geography department at a major U.S. university to be housed within a business college. Gordon's research interests in the economic base of communities, settlement-size distributions, central place theory, transportation, regional development (in particular, the "chicken-and-egg" connections between economic and population growth), and the structure of small-town and micropolitan area economies, which were kindled in his childhood and in grad school, would be further enflamed and greatly expanded thanks to his career-long academic home base.
As part of both its unique and highly popular business school undergraduate major in regional development (originally area development) and its geography master's degree, the University of Arizona's department offered a six-week summer traveling field camp course. Co-directed by Professors Richard Reeves (Gordon's closest Tucson personal friend) and Lay Gibson, the camp's unique curriculum featured and integrated projects in both physical and economic geography. Student teams each year carried out studies in Arizona's diverse ecosystems and in small, often remote, small-town communities. There student teams would census and then interview and assemble micro transaction and trade figures from all local businesses. Gordon was fascinated by the potential of these nearly comprehensive data to expose the workings of functionally specialized economies and to benchmark models. Together with student and colleague collaborators, he deployed this unique Arizona community data base in a series of papers evaluating the accuracy and proposing extensions to traditional economic base multiplier methods.
In 1980–81, the Arizona department would add its third active regional scientist, David Plane from the regional science department at Penn, and in the subsequent year, under the tenure of Lay Gibson as Department Head, the geography department would leave the College of Business and Public Administration to join a fledging College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Gibson at this time was also assuming the leadership position (replacing Robert Monahan of Western Washington University) of the Western Regional Science Association, with Mulligan and Plane beginning what would become lifetime involvements with the Association.
In 1985, the departmental headship passed to Gordon. During his five-year term he would lay substantial groundwork for, and touch off the upcoming rise in prominence of Arizona as one of the U.S.'s top-20 geography doctoral programs and as a world-renowned center of regional science. (Gordon would later come back to serve one-year stint as Acting Head). Gordon increased the visibility of geography and regional development on campus and externally by extending courtesy joint and adjunct faculty appointments to geographers and faculty with geographic expertise who had been hired in other units across the university.
During the 1990s, the core group of internationally active regional scientist scholars at Arizona was expanded with the hirings of University of Illinois Ph.D.'s, Adrian Esparza and Brigitte Waldorf in Geography and Regional Development, and University of Washington Ph.D., John Carruthers in the M.S. program in Planning, a group whose faculty also included Penn Regional Science Ph.D., Arthur Silvers.
The department's regional development undergraduate major numbers rose dramatically during Gordon's administration after the degree program was moved from Business and Public Administration to Social and Behavioral Sciences, and then during Plane's subsequent headships when it peaked at more than 300. Gibson, Mulligan, and Plane served as student faculty advisors and taught the majority the core curriculum. Gordon's staple, highly enrolled undergraduate courses were titled, Economic Geography, Urban Geography, Locational Analysis, and Regional Analysis. The 1980s and 1990s would also see Gordon mentoring and carrying out collaborative research with increasing numbers of graduate students.
After stepping down as Head in 1990, Gordon's extramural professional service commitments increased in 1994 when Plane was asked by longtime Journal of Regional Science Managing Editor, Ronald Miller, to move the journal's office from Philadelphia to Tucson. Plane agreed, on the condition that Mulligan join him as Co-editor. Their efficient working arrangement and happy tenure guiding the JRS would extend through 2002, when the editorial team reins were passed to Marlon Boarnet and Andy Haughwout. Marlon recalls that, during the transition, Gordon told him that he and Dave had worked hard to maintain the JRS as a "classy" operation.
Though Gordon formally retired in 2006, he did not stop his work in regional science or his devotion to it: he remained a prolific author and a stalwart mentor to junior members of the field. In February, 2010, a celebratory dinner and a series of special sessions were held in his honor at the WRSA's annual meeting in Sedona, Arizona, yielding a special (2012) issue of The Annals of Regional Science.
The year 2010 also saw Gordon's election as a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International. Although this honor is usually conveyed at a major international conference, he chose to receive his plaque, presented by David Boyce, while hiking in Glacier National Park. The "Meet the Fellows" autobiographical article that Gordon wrote in 2015 for the RSAI Newsletter is a lively and interesting read, with the piece beginning: Imagine if you can an Allan Stilltoe novel set on a Norwegian fjord and you might have some idea about my childhood years!
In recognition of Gordon's corpus of intellectual accomplishments and his four decades of contributions to WRSA, he was named a WRSA Fellow at the 2014 Annual Meeting in San Diego.
Up through last summer, Gordon continued to travel the globe and to present and participate at regional science conferences, in particular those of the WRSA and the British and Irish Section (BIS). At the July, 2023 BIS meeting in Newcastle, he gave a talk on the legacy and central place research contributions of John Parr in the Regional Science Academy's Great Minds session.
At the upcoming February 11–14, 2024, WRSA Annual Meeting in Monterey, California, Professor Neil Reid, University of Toledo, will present a Regional Science Academy, Great Minds in Regional Science talk on Gordon Mulligan's scholarship.
While Gordon gave talks and tended to various duties at academic meetings, he played another, very special role: he was a hub of activity, both socially and professionally. Whether it was the (late) morning, afternoon, evening, or wee hours of the night, he was with friends and colleagues, launching new projects and revisiting past explorations. His generosity with ideas was infectious, fun, and inspiring, particularly to junior colleagues. A man of tall stature, Gordon was informed and passionate about big concepts in all realms, not just those of geographic location and economic theory about which he was especially expert.
Like so many members of our field, Gordon loved models—especially gravity models and models of spatial equilibrium. It seems fitting, then, to end this description of his life and career with an analogy to a model. In the mid-1500s, the great mathematician Copernicus advanced a model of heliocentrism, placing, for the first time, the Earth and other celestial objects in orbit around the sun. A Copernican model of WRSA might well place Gordon at a central (albeit far from stationary!) location, with those of us lucky enough to be in his orbit drawn close by his gravity and warmed by the bright light of his intellect, humor, and enduring smile.
John Carruthers and David Plane