Isard, Walter (1919-)

Walter Isard is the father of the discipline of Regional science. Often characterized as an “economic geographer,” his work is much broader, also encompassing urban and regional planning, operations research, transportation, applied engineering, political science, sociology, and ecology.

The focus of regional science is on space and location, and it treats a region (any subnational entity not necessarily defined by political boundaries) as an organic whole.

Walter Isard was born in Philadelphia in 1919. He graduated from Temple University with honors in 1939 and then studied at Harvard and the University of Chicago. While working for the National Resource Planning Board during World War II, he completed his dissertation on building cycles and transportation development and received his PhD from Harvard in 1945. Isard returned to Harvard that year as a research associate and an instructor, and he designed the first course in location theory there. By the late 1940s, he helped form a small group of economists, which eventually expanded in number and breadth to include people from related disciplines, culminating in the founding of the Regional Science Association in 1954. Isard moved to the department of city and regional planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. In 1956, he was invited to join the economics department at the University of Pennsylvania but insisted on forming his own department of regional science, which he served as chair until 1975. He initiated the Journal of Regional Science in 1958 and later founded the journals Regional Science and Urban Economics and The International Regional Science Review in the early 1970s.

The second discipline founded by Isard was Peace Science, a rigorous, interdisciplinary inquiry into the topic. In 1963, he helped form what is now the Peace Science Society, and in 2006, he established the journal Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.

Isard's key initial contribution was the reformulation of the work of European location theorists, such as von Thünen, Alfred Weber, Walter Christaller, and August Lösch, into neoclassical microeconomics. Although there were several scholars who worked on this topic in the United States previously, Isard's Location and Space Economy provided a comprehensive, unified framework. Prior to this, economics lacked a formal spatial dimension and treated the economy as if it operated on the head of a pin. Interestingly, the neoclassical core of regional science has caused a distancing between this discipline and human geography, as the latter places an increased emphasis on social theory and political economy.

Isard published several other influential books over the next 20 years, including Industrial Complex Analysis and Regional Development in 1959 (an early foray into agglomeration economies); Methods of Regional Analysis in 1960 (instruction on a broad spectrum of analytical and practical tools, including input-output analysis and various types of mathematical programming); General Theory: Social, Political, Economic and Regional in 1963 (to further unify various aspects of spatial analysis, economics, and related disciplines); Ecological Economic Analysis for Regional Development in 1972 (a precursor of modern ecological economics); and the textbook Introduction to Regional Science in 1972.

In 1977, Isard moved to Cornell University, where he was given appointments in the department of economics and city and regional planning, as well as the regional science program and peace science program, which he established (he had held a visiting appointment at Cornell since 1971). Isard is now professor emeritus at Cornell and remains active in several fields at the time of this writing.

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