Regional Science

Definition

According to its founding father, Walter Isard, regional science uses diverse combinations of analytical and empirical research to study social problems with regional or spatial dimensions. While major concerns of many social disciplines involve regional or spatial dimensions, regional science exhibits a multidisciplinary aspect in both its research topics and its research methods. Accordingly, scholars in regional science, called “regional scientists,” may be educated in the disciplines of regional science, economics, demography, political science, sociology, geography, civil engineering, urban planning, law, and public policy, among others. Due to this multidisciplinary feature, regional scientists have experienced difficulties in delivering a widely accepted definition of regional science. Nevertheless, Walter Isard has suggested three indispensible components of regional science: regions, social issues, and science.

Regional science focuses primarily on regions. A region might be a county, a city, a group of counties, a state, or a megaregion involving more than one state. It is generally a geographic unit smaller than the nation in which it is found. Regional science also concerns social issues. Unlike Earth scientists or physical geographers interested in physical attributes on Earth's surface, regional scientists focus on human activity or social issues in a region and address interactions between human beings and the region where they are located. Last, regional science is labeled as science. Regional science not only borrows scientific methods from the disciplines of mathematics, economics, and statistics, as many other social sciences do, but it also develops its own analytical tools (e.g., spatial statistics and spatial econometrics).

History

Social scientists have been studying regions for a long time. Early influential work in regional science includes agricultural location theory, developed by Johann Heinrich von Thünen; industrial location theory, developed by Alfred Weber; and central place theory, developed by Walter Christaller and August Lösch, all of which are part of location theory, which addresses factors affecting the location choice of economic activity. In the 1940s, some social scientists, led by the MIT economist Walter Isard, felt that the importance of regions in the social sciences was inadequately addressed and thus endeavored to build a research field as well as a scholarly association that focused on the interactions between human beings and regions. The launch of the Regional Science Association in 1954 signified the formation of a multidisciplinary field, “regional science,” and enabled better codification of methods and exchange of ideas among economists, geo g-raphers, sociologists, statisticians, and urban planners.

Regional science was recognized by a large number of social scientists soon after its formal establishment in the 1950s and experienced a remarkable expansion thereafter. Several path-breaking publications drove the development of regional science and fostered its international acceptance as an independent yet interdisciplinary research field. Brigitte Waldorf identifies Location and Spatial Economy and Methods of Regional Science by Walter Isard, Location and Land Use by William Alonso, Entropy in Urban and Regional Modeling by Alan Wilson, Spatial Econometrics by Luc Anselin, and The Spatial Economy by Fujita et al. as important books central to regional science. The growing influence of this research field paralleled the international expansion of the Regional Science Association [Page 2394](renamed as the Regional Science Association International in 1990). By 2008, it consisted of more than 4,000 scholars from all over the world and has developed into the umbrella organization of three supranational organizations, North American/Americas Association, the European Regional Science Association, and the Pacific Regional Science Conference Organization, which further oversee many subnational, national, and cross-cutting, language-based regional science organizations (e.g., the Western Regional Science Association in the United States; the French Section, the German Section, and the Nordic Section in Europe; and the Japanese Section in Asia Pacific). The two decades following the establishment of the RSA also saw the creation of academic programs in regional science in some universities, notably the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Graduates from those programs later became the leading scholars in regional science—for example, William Alonso, Masahisa Fujita, and Luc Anselin. Meanwhile, journals focusing on regional science were founded, including Papers in Regional Science (1955), Journal of Regional Science (1958), the Annals of Regional Science (1967), Regional Science and Urban Economics (1971), and International Regional Science Review (1975). These journals contributed considerably to the development of the regional science field.

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