Regional science
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Regional science is a field of geography that emerged in 1950s North America to provide a stronger objective and quantitative base to research on human activities. Its formal roots date to the aggressive campaigns by Walter Isard and his supporters to promote the "objective" and "scientific" analysis of settlement, industrial location, and urban development from the 1950s. Isard targeted key universities and campaigned tirelessly. Supporters claimed that settlement patterns and location may be subjected to formal economic and mathematical modeling, which opens the possibility of optimisation (e.g. of location of a facility) and prediction (e.g. of future supply-demand relationships across space). Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to, behavioral modeling of location, transportation, and migration decisions, land use and urban development, inter-industry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial statistics.
While the field maintains national and international associations, journals, and a conference circuit (notably in North America, continental Europe, Japan and Korea), the turn in academic geography away from the quantitative analysis of human activities as an end in itself - or as a guide to planners or corporations - has been very strong. Attacks on its practitioners by radical critics from the 1970s, notably David Harvey who believed it lacked social and political commitment, were notable and heated. The dawning of globalization and the internet age has rendered one core technique of regional science, location theory, less applicable - many activities don't require 'optimal spatial location' at all. The rise of geographic information systems has allowed predictive modeling and analysis to be done more efficiently, and by non-specialists. Today there are dwindling numbers of practioners in mainstream geography departments (the largest grouping in North America is probably at the University of Arizona). More commonly, broadly-trained 'new' economic geographers able to combine quantitative work with other research techniques are giving new life to the field, for example at the London School of Economics. The Department of Regional Science at the University of Pennyslvania, Isard's brainchild, has now been closed down.
Trevor Barnes argues that the decline of regional science in North America, and the bitterness some of its practitioners feel about this, could have been avoided. He says "It is unreflective, and consequently inured to change, because of a commitment to a God’s eye view. It is so convinced of its own rightness, of its Archimedean position, that it remained aloof and invariant, rather than being sensitive to its changing local context." (Barnes in Canadian J of Reg.Sci.1 (http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~tbarnes/CSRA%20new.doc)
External links
- Regional Science Association International (http://www.regionalscience.org)
- North American Regional Science Council (http://www.narsc.org)
- Western Regional Science Association (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~plane/wrsa.html)
- Critical research articles and the history of the field (http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~tbarnes/) by Trevor Barnes, UBC]