Regional science at sixty: Traditional topics and new directions
Gordon F. Mulligan
Abstract
This paper addresses international research in regional science - a multidisciplinary field that is now 60 years old. The mainstream research is discussed using six broad categories of analysis: demographic, environmental, location, regional, transportation, and urban. The paper then proposes 14 topics or themes for future research, chosen especially to encourage new or younger scholars to the field. In alphabetical order these are: behavior and heterogeneity, environmental issues, global urbanization, happiness, housing and land use, metropolitan sorting, neighborhood change, networks, nonmetropolitan living, post-event growth and development, regional creativity, regional decline, regional specialisation, and resource inequality. Useful insights to all of these topics likely can be made at different geographic and temporal scales and scholarship might involve a wide variety of research perspectives and methodologies. However, some approaches (e.g., hedonic pricing) and some topics (e.g., strategic government behavior, decline of metropolitan areas) are presently of greater interest to U.S. scholars and it remains unclear whether these will prove to be equally popular elsewhere. The paper also calls for more international research on issues related to spatial welfare and resource inequality.
15 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.55 × 0.4 = 0.22 |
| M · momentum | 0.70 × 0.15 = 0.11 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.