Peter Batey (p)

Peter Nijkamp

In the late 1940s, Walter Isard began to generate interest in an inter-disciplinary field centred on the analytical understanding of regions. He became a tireless advocate for 'regional science' and in 1954 founded the Regional Science Association. From the outset, city planners played a full part in the Association, reflecting a burgeoning interest in metropolitan regions and transportation planning.
Isard pitched the first regional science conferences at a highly technical level but quickly realized that city planners were not trained to think of regions in an abstract way and generally had little grounding in mathematics needed to understand and apply the new techniques. He therefore took steps to 'bring planners on board', organizing joint meetings of the American Institute of Planners and the RSA. The initiative was a limited success. The first regional science textbook, Methods of Regional Analysis, published in 1960 by Isard and colleagues, had a much greater impact, offering planners a range of analytical techniques, many of which could be applied quite readily.
The paper describes how the University of Pennsylvania served as a test-bed for many of the new analytical methods being developed at the time, focusing on the head of the planning school, Robert Mitchell whose contribution was crucial. A keen analyst of urban structure and change but also a respected leader of public thought and action, Mitchell was well-placed to succeed Isard as President of the RSA in 1959. He showed how regional science could support city planning and outlined new thinking about the plan-making process.
British experience regarding regional science and planning is examined. Here the planning profession was slower to recognize the contribution social science could make to plan-making. In the late 1960s, things begun to change. Planners in local authorities had begun work on a new type of strategic land-use plan. Brian McLoughlin published a textbook on what he termed a Systems Approach, heavily based on American thinking and that of Mitchell in particular. Not a highly technical exposition, the book nevertheless did enough to suggest how regional science might help. It had a big influence on practice throughout the 1970s.
The paper reviews the lead up to the present situation, and shows that nowadays that planning methods are alive and well, but not in regional science meetings. It ends by posing the question “spatial planning was once an important part of the regional science community, can it be so again?”

Daniel Shefer (p)

Peter Nijkamp

This paper briefly traces the impact of regional science on urban and regional planning in the past sixty years. Significant milestones in the transformation of urban and regional planning activity, from primarily physical land use planning to a multi-dimensional activity involving sophisticated analytical tools are presented. This paradigm change reviled itself by replacing macro analysis with microanalysis, stressing the importance of inter-connectivity between economic agents and human behavior (agglomeration and clustering). The multi-dimensional analyses and evaluation of socio-economic and environmental issues impacting welfare of people revealed itself in the arrangement and control of land uses in space. In order to accommodate a growing number of people who choose to settle in urban regions, it is necessary to provide them with adequate infrastructure – housing, employment, transportation (accessibility), health and educational facilities and more. At the same time in order to maintain a high quality of life, it is necessary to protect the environment and reduce congestion and pollution in urban areas. Regional science tools and techniques are sin-qua-non in accomplishing these urban and regional planning objectives.

Tomaz Dentinho (p)

Peter Nijkamp

The paper proposes and estimates an urban growth entropic model to explain the evolution of the urban system Portugal from 1850 to 2010. The hypothesis to be tested is that there are permanent territorial factors that, associated to costs of friction, destiny and origin, influence the maximization of human interaction within space. To test that hypothesis the paper presents a formulation of a city growth model derived from economic growth models but with an entropy production function and that relates city size with human, economic, spatial and historical explanatory variables. The model estimated for the Portuguese cities shows that the adaptation of the economic growth model to a city growth model with spatial variables explain the differentiated evolution of cities providing a spatial explanation for urban hierarchy.