Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned about analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. 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 data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.
Regional science was founded in the late 1940s when some economists began to become dissatisfied with the low level of regional economic analysis and felt an urge to upgrade it. But even in this early era, the founders of regional science expected to catch the interest of people from a wide variety of disciplines. Regional science's 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. Isard targeted key universities and campaigned tirelessly. Accordingly, the Regional Science Association was founded in 1954, when the core group of scholars and practitioners held its first meetings independent from those initially held as sessions of the anuual meetings of the American Economics Association. Now called the Regional Science Association International, it maintains subnational and international associations, journals, and a conference circuit (notably in North America, continental Europe, Japan, and Korea). Membership in the RSAI continues to grow.
Topically speaking, regional science took off in the wake of publications by Edgar M. Hoover's books Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industry (published in 1937) and The Location of Economic Activity (in 1948); Edgar S. Dunn's (1954) The Location of Agricultural Production; Edward Chamberlin's (1950) The Theory of Monopolistic Competition; Martin J. Beckmann, C.B McGuire, and Clifford B. Winston's (1956) book Studies in the Economics of Transportation; August Lösch's (1954) The Economics of Location; Melvin L Greenhut's (1956) tome Plant Location in Theory and Practice; Albert O. Hirshman's (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development published; and Claude Ponsard's (1958) Histoire des théorie économique spatiales. Nonetheless, Walter Isard's first book in 1956, Location and Space Economy, apprently captured the imagination of many, and his second, Methods of Regional Analysis published in 1960, only fortified his place as the father of the field.
Walter Isard's efforts culminated in the creation of a few academic departments and several university-wide programs in regional science. At Walter Isard's suggestion, the University of Pennsylvania started the Regional Science Department in 1956. It featured as its first graduate William Alonso and was looked upon by many to be the international academic leader for the field. But its unusual multidisciplinary orientation undoubtedly encouraged its demise, and it lost its department status in 1992.
Part of the movement was, and continues to be, associated with political and economic realities of the role of the local community. By targeting federal resources to specific geographic areas the Kennedy administration realized that political favors could be bought. This is also evident in Europe and other geographic areas were economic areas do not coincide with political boundaries. In the more current era of devolution knowledge about “local solutions to local problems” has driven much of the interest in regional science. In the spirit of Walter Isard, regional science is truly interdisciplinary and is not limited to geographers, economists, political scientists, or sociologists.
In 1991, Paul Krugman, a highly regarded international trade theorist, put out a call for economists to pay more attention to econonomic geography in a book entitled Geography and Trade, focussing largely on the core regional science concept of agglomeration economies.
Today there are dwindling numbers of members from academic planning programs and mainstream geography departments (the largest grouping in North America is probably at the University of Arizona). (Although, there has been some revival among geographers, as broadly-trained 'new' economic geographers combine quantitative work with other research techniques, for example at the London School of Economics.) Perhaps part of the decline in interest from practitioners in planning and geography may be due to the rise of geographic information systems and other readily used statistical and modeling software, which have allowed predictive modeling and analysis to be done more efficiently and by non-specialists. In fact, such easy quantification apparently has induced somewhat of a reactionary response among some in academic geography away from the quantitative analysis of human activities as an end in itself - or as a guide to planners or corporations[citation needed]. Attacks on regional science's practitioners by radical critics started as early as the 1970s, notably David Harvey who believed it lacked social and political commitment. Such debates became strong and heated, as exemplified by some arguments by Trevor Barnes who suggests that the decline of regional science practice among planners and geographers in North America 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." [1]
The dawning of globalization and the internet age has rendered one core technique of regional science, ___location theory, less applicable - since a number of social activities require no 'optimal spatial ___location' whatsoever. Then again, the unification of Europe and the increased internationalization of the world's economic, social, and political realms has generated more interest in the study of regional, as opposed to national, phenomena.