Charles Leven was President of Regional Science Association International in 1964-65. He died on March 15, 2011.

 Charles Leven Obituary (26.49 kB)

Alexander Granberg, Russian regional scientist passes away.

Aug. 24—Academician and regional scientist Alexander Granberg died Aug. 22 2010, in his 75th year. He had remained active as Russia’s senior specialist on integrated economic development projects, serving as chairman of the SOPS (Council for the Study of Productive Forces, a joint government-Academy body which is the successor of Academician Vladimir Vernadsky’s KEPS organization). Academician Granberg was a member of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, headed its Regional Studies Council, and had earlier been chairman of the Russian National Committee on Pacific Ocean Economic Cooperation.
Based in Novosibirsk for many years, Granberg designed and guided many projects for Siberia and the Russian Far East, including the current national plan for the development of those regions, and was working on the Industrial Urals-Polar Urals project design in recent years. Victor Ishayev, Presidential Representative for the Far East Federal District, released his telegram of condolences to the Russian Academy of Sciences and Granberg’s family, which he sent from Kamchatka on the Pacific coast, where Ishayev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and others are holding meetings
on fisheries-related infrastructure development. Ishayev wrote:
“Academician Alexander Grigoryevich Granberg was a famous scientific economist, an outstanding
teacher, and the author of works on regional economic development. . . . We valued his reverent attitude toward Russia’s Far East, and his participation in drafting the Federal Comprehensive Socioeconomic Development Program for the Far East and Transbaikal, as well as his
work on specific infrastructure projects. Granberg was a frequent and much welcome guest in the East of our country. We will miss him.”
In April 2007, Academician Granberg chaired the Moscow conference on “Megaprojects of the Russian East: A Transcontinental Eurasia-America Transport Link via the Bering Strait,” a SOPS-sponsored event to which Lyndon LaRouche’s invited contribution was the paper, “The World’s Political Map Changes: Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed” (EIR, May 4, 2007, http://tiny.cc/dmpss). The following month, at the 80th birthday celebration of Prof. Stanislav Menshikov, Granberg offered a memorable toast to the completion of the Bering Strait tunnel by the year 2027. In 2009, Granberg endorsed Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s call to put the “La-Rouche Plan to Save the World Economy,” onto the world’s agenda

Founder of regional science, Walter Isard, dies aged 91.

 Walter Isard obituary (16.74 kB)

RSAI is deeply saddened to report the death of Andrew Isserman

Andrew Mark Isserman (1947-2010)

Andrew Isserman died unexpectedly on November 4, 2010 of an apparent heart attack after engaging in basketball game in preparation for a faculty-graduate student challenge match.  At the University of Illinois, Andy was Professor of Regional Economics, Planning and Public Policy with primary appointments in the departments of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and Urban and Regional Planning and affiliate appointments in the Institute of Government and Public Affairs and the Department of Geography.

After completing his doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania (David Boyce was his advisor), he moved to Illinois for the first of two appointments at that institution.  He was an Assistant Professor in both Urban and Regional Planning and Economics, receiving promotion to Associate Professor in 1977.  In 1981, he joined the faculty of the University of Iowa as an Associate Professor of Planning, Geography and Economics; he was promoted to Professor in 1984.  A year later, he moved to West Virginia University where he directed the Regional Research Institute upon William Miernyk’s retirement. At West Virginia, he also held appointments in Economics and Geography and for eight months he served as Interim Assistant Provost for International Affairs. He remained at WVU until 1998 when he returned to Illinois with a small detour  to serve as Research Director of the Public Policy Institute of California.  From 2002-2004, he was the head of the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at Illinois.

Andy was a passionate scholar, whether it was research, teaching, advising students, serving on committees, or helping to promote regional science; his energy level was always high.  He loved to walk around campus engaged in conversation and was often reluctant to leave a meeting or a classroom.  He was an innovative teacher, who emphasized learning-by-doing and used a variety of approaches to engaging students with material.  In addition to more standard courses in urban and regional analysis, economic impact analysis, and federal program analysis, he conducted a film and writing course on regional cultures and economies. His take was that whether it was film, narrative, quantitative articles or even personal experiences, effective story telling was a critical component to understand how systems, especially the regional economy, worked.

Andy was the founding editor of the International Regional Science Review and was forever proselytizing for innovative articles and contributions during the twenty years (1976-1996) he served in this position.  His experiences in this role were translated into two doctoral courses in regional development that helped build students’ research and writing skills. His teaching was recognized over many years as among the University’s best.

His research on federal policy, often conducted with graduate students, has contributed to changes in several federal programs. He conducted applied research for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation. He has been scholar-in-residence or fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Appalachian Regional Commission, and Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

He pioneered methods for analyzing and forecasting economic and demographic change.  Perhaps, some of the most cited work centers on his experimentation with matching regions in the search for ways to isolate the impacts of policies or programs.  He is listed as one of the 50 faculty members with the greatest number of citations in urban and regional planning and among the 100 all-time intellectual leaders of regional science.  He received awards or fellowships from the American Planning Association, American Statistical Association, National Council for Geographic Education, and Regional Science Association International.  His activities in regional science were extensive.  He served as President of the Southern Regional Science Association in  1991-1992.  In 1999, he received the David Boyce Award for Service to Regional Science of the North American Regional Science Council, and in 2005 he was President of the North American Regional Science Council.

Rodney C. Jensen, past president of RSAI, died on August 23, 2009

The RSAI is sad to report the passing of Emeritus Professor Rodney C. Jensen on 23 August after a long illness. He was 74 years old.

Rod was one of the earliest adopters of regional science in Australia, and was particularly influential in the development of input-output modelling. He was President of the Australian and New Zealand Section of the Regional Science Association International from 1983 to 1986.

Rod played a leading role in ensuring regional science in Australasia was strongly connected with international scholars. He participated in the Second European Regional Science Summer Institute in 1974. In 1990 he served as President of Regional Science Association International, the first Australian to hold this position.

The recent PRSCO international conference held on the Australian Gold Coast included two special sessions on input-output modelling in honour of Rod Jensen. During those sessions, many of his former colleagues and students spoke appreciatively of Rod’s scientific contributions and leadership.

Everyone connected with RSAI expresses its condolences to his wife Enid and their family.

Reginald Golledge

It is with great sadness we report that Reginald Golledge passed away on 29^th May. He was a Professor in the Geography Department in the University of California of Santa Barbara. Aged 71, he was planning to retire within the next month or so. Reg was well known throughout the international Regional Science community. He was a wonderful friend to many of us. The RSAI sends our sympathies to his family and friends.

Reg Golledge was born in Australia in 1937, where he grew up in the bush and studied for his BA (Hons) and his MA at the University of New England, where he became a Tutor in the department of Geography. After a few years lecturing in the geography Department at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, in the mid 1960s he went to the US where he studied for his doctorate at the University of Iowa. He spent many years in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University before moving to the University of California Santa Barbara in the late 1970s where he spent the rest of his career.
Golledge became a truly outstanding scholar in Geography and Regional Science, keeping up a steam of high quality research publications continuously right up until the time of his death. He was one of the major contributors to the development of the field of analytical behavioural geography and was internationally recognised for his pioneering work in spatial cognition and more recently in the geography of disability. His publications include many contributions in the fields of spatial analysis and transportation. Many of his publications were collaborative efforts with fellow geographers and regional scientists from many parts of the world. He was a great collaborator, an inspiring teacher and a tireless servant to his professional associations, being a past president of the Association of American Geographers. Reg played a leading role in the development of the Geography Department at USCB as one of the intellectual powerhouses in analytical geography.
In recent years Golledge’s scholarship had been recognised by the award of a number of honorary doctorates and awards for outstanding achievements from professional associations. He was a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. In 2009 Golledge was elected as a Fellow of RSAI and was to receive his Fellowship award at the San Francisco meeting of NARSC in November.
For many years Reg had suffered a series of debilitating health problems, but he seemed to always bounce back from them, and he seemed even more academically productive. Unfortunately in the last few years those health problems became more acute and diverse, and finally he passed away at home on the night of 29 May.
Reg is survived by his wife Allison, and their two children, Bryan and Brittany, and by two children, Stephany and Linda, from a previous marriage. His sister and two surviving brothers live in Australia.

RSAI is very sad to announce the death of Prof. Kumata, Immediate Past President of PRSCO, and the Japanese Section of RSAI. He made a major contribution to regional science in Japan and also to RSAI developments around the World as President of PRSCO. Our sympathies are with his family and our Japanese colleagues and friends at this sad time.

Benjamin Chinitz, who served as President of the Regional Science Association, 1969-1970, died on March 30 at the age of 84.

Benjamin Chinitz - economist worked with three US presidents
BENJAMIN CHINITZ
Benjamin Chinitz, a nationally recognized urban and regional economist who counseled three presidents, died Monday, March 30, 2009 of pneumonia at Hebrew SeniorLife nursing home in Roslindale. He was 84 and had Alzheimer's disease. Born and raised in New York City, Dr. Chinitz strayed from family tradition by not becoming a rabbi. After graduating in 1945 from Yeshiva University in New York and serving as an Air Force sergeant in the Philippines until 1946, Dr. Chinitz moved to New England to pursue an education in economics. While a student at Brown University in Providence in 1950, he married Ethel Kleinman, whom he had met when relatives set the pair up on a date. The couple settled in Newton and had two sons.
Dr. Chinitz received a master's degree in economics from Brown in 1951, followed by a doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1956. Upon graduation, Dr. Chinitz began a three-year stint with the New York Metropolitan Region Study as a transportation economist and developed a keen interest in urban and regional economics, or what he called his "permanent identity" in a 1995 article in Eastern Economic Journal. "They were intellectual issues that affected the everyday lives of people, and he felt that he could make a difference in the lives of people as the economy changed and the landscape changed," said his son, Michael of Newton.
From 1959 to 1965, he was a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. While there, in November 1963, Dr. Chinitz sat in the White House Cabinet room with President John F. Kennedy, 10 days before Kennedy was assassinated. Less than a year later, he was invited to join President Lyndon B. Johnson's task force on transportation policy. During the Johnson administration, Dr. Chinitz was deputy assistant secretary for economic development in the Department of Commerce from 1965 to 1966.

From 1967 to 1973, he taught economics at Brown. While there in the spring of 1970, Dr. Chinitz returned to the White House and advised President Richard Nixon on urban policy. "He was very optimistic . . . with his work and general outlook in life," said George Borts, who worked with Dr. Chinitz at Brown. "Economists are generally thought to be pessimistic; it's the nature of the field itself. It lends you to think in terms of examining . . . the malfunctioning of institutions," said Borts. "But he was more of a creator than a critic."
After serving as an economic adviser to Governor Frank Licht of Rhode Island from 1969 to 1972, Dr. Chintz was a professor of economics at the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1973 to 1982. That overlapped with his position as senior vice president of Abt Associates, a Cambridge think tank, where he worked from 1976 to 1980.
From 1982 to '87, he served as dean of the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. From 1987 to 1990, Dr. Chinitz was research director for Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge. He retired in 1993.
Throughout his career, Dr. Chinitz published books and papers, including "Freight and the Metropolis" in 1960 and "City and Suburb" in 1965.
Known at Brown for hosting networking parties for students and at UMass-Lowell for bringing national accreditation to the College of Management, Dr. Chinitz inspired his students and his colleagues. When asked to speak at her retirement luncheon a week ago, Susan Jacobs could only think of Dr. Chinitz, her former economics professor at Brown, who had motivated her to work for the federal government more than 30 years ago. "I said something [he] had once told me: 'You know you have a good job when you wake up and think, I couldn't imagine having a better job to go to,' " said Jacobs, of Silver Spring, Md. "I was fortunate to have a job that met that test." She added: "He was devoted to making improvements in his field. He was not just a textbook professor."
Dr. Chinitz devoted a lot of his free time to improving Jewish education, particularly in Providence and Boston. He was also a lifetime trustee of Temple Emmanuel in Newton. Besides Michael, Dr. Chinitz leaves another son, Adam of New York City; two brothers, Jacob and Zelig, both of Israel; a sister, Helen Wohlgerlenter of Philadelphia; and three grandchildren.
His wife died in April 2006. A memorial service will be held today at the home of Michael and Karen Chinitz.
Benjamin Chinitz served as President of the Regional Science Association during 1969-1970.

RSAI is sad to report the death of Thomas Reiner, one of several graduate students who followed Walter Isard from MIT to the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1950s, and later became a faculty member in the Regional Science Department. He died on March 3. An obituary is attached, with a picture.

Reiner taught and wrote about regional developemen, particularly with regard to developing regions. He is remembered for his caring manner in counseling students, especially ones from developing countries. During the 1960s he accompanied Walter Isard on several journeys to Europe, Japan and Latin America in efforts to establish the field of Regional Science outside North America.

David Boyce

Archivist

Regional Science Association International

The Philadelphia Inquirer Posted on Thu, Mar. 12, 2009
Thomas A. Reiner, Penn professor
Thomas A. Reiner, 77, of Manhattan, an emeritus professor of regional science at the University of Pennsylvania, died of leukemia March 3 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Mr. Reiner fled with his parents to England in 1939 and in 1942 arrived in the States on a ship that had survived being torpedoed.
Mr. Reiner graduated from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York in 1948, his brother Martin said, and in 1952 from Swarthmore College. He earned his master's degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and his doctorate in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963.
Mr. Reiner began teaching at Penn in 1958, his son, Salem, said, and retired in 1993. In the Philadelphia region, he had lived most recently in Ardmore. He was a consultant to the U.S.
Agency for International Development and to the Inter-American Development Bank. He was coauthor of Transitions in Land and Housing: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Poland, which was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996. He authored The Place of the Ideal Community in Urban Planning, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1963.
Besides his son and brother, Mr. Reiner is survived by his wife, Susan; daughter, Lisa; and three grandchildren.

The RSAI is sad to hear of the death of Leslie Curry, on January 12, 2009, at the age of 86.

Les was a major contributor to the new theoretical geography of the quantitative revolution and was active in the RSA/RSAI from its early days. Although he began his academic career as a physical geography (even then working on climate change) he will best remembered for his pioneering work on settlement theory, gravity modelling and stochastic processes generally for map description.

Our thoughts are with his family and friends and former colleagues at the University of Toronto.

Full obituary appears below.

In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus Leslie Curry

Author: Anonymous

Les Curry, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Toronto and recipient of the Meritorious Contributions Award of the Association of American Geographers in 1969, died on January 12, 2009, at his home in Annapolis, MD. He was 86. He was pre-deceased by his first wife, Jean Blick Curry, who died in 1981. Survivors include his wife of 18 years, Caryl Pines Curry of Annapolis; three children from his first marriage, William Curry of Oakville, Ontario, Claudia Curry of Port Hope, Ontario, and Ann Curry-Stevens of Portland, Ore.; two stepchildren, Eve Pines of Springfield, Ill., and Roger Pines of Chicago; and seven grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at the Faculty Club, University of Toronto, on Monday, April 20th 2009. If you would like to attend, please contact Andrew Malcolm at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Les Curry was born and raised in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. After a standard grammar-school education, at age 18 he volunteered for the Royal Navy, and joined the 14th destroyer flotilla (as a radar mechanic) based initially in Alexandria, Egypt. His ship joined convoys to supply Malta and then supported invasions in the Aegean and Italy. It was in Anzio that his ship had its bows blown off, requiring a return to Britain via Gibraltar. Next, he was in the Normandy invasion when the bombardment of special targets was the main activity. When the war ended, he was training as crew on a submarine destined for deployment to the Far East.

Les Curry graduated from Kings College at the University of Durham in 1949. Two years later, he received a master's degree in geography from Johns Hopkins University while he was a Fulbright Scholar. He worked as an economist at the United Nations and then at Charles Warren Thornthwaite's Laboratory of Climatology in Seabrook, N.J. He received his doctorate in geography from the University of Auckland in New Zealand in 1959 and taught at the University of Washington, the University of Maryland and Arizona State University before moving to the University of Toronto, where he spent 21 years before retiring in 1985. He then moved to Annapolis. 

As a theoretician, Les Curry was a modeler, using stochastic analysis to delvep deeply into processes, especially economic, that produce the patterns and flows of the world. One of his early papers showed that natural climatic change could occur as the result of random exchanges involving heat storage in the oceans. Another paper treated central places, again in terms of inventory management and stochastic processes. Author of the book The Random Spatial Economy and Its Evolution (1998), he was featured in Geographical Voices (2002), an anthology of autobiographical essays by 14 eminent geographers, edited by Peter Gould and Forrest Pitts. 

In addition to his AAG Meritorious Contributions award, Les Curry's honours included a Visiting Commonwealth Professorship in the U.S.; a Guggenheim Fellowship at Cambridge University; an inaugural Connaught Senior Fellowship in the Social Sciences; a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center in Bellagio; a Fellowship at Australian National University; and the Canadian Association of Geographers' Award for Scholarly Distinction. He also received the International Geographical Union's prestigious Lauréat d'Honneur 2000; only three or four are awarded every fourth year at the IGU's conference. The IGU citation describes him as 'a scholar who by way of his contributions in climatology, economic geography and spatial analysis has challenged established lines of thinking and provided valuable new insights into the ways whereby human behavior shapes the world we live in. Professor Curry's theoretical studies in economic geography, especially studies that draw upon the mathematics of probability theory and the concepts of physical systems analysis, have been unmatched in their originality and rigor and have established his international reputation as one of the leading theoreticians in the discipline.?