Two frontiers for regional science: Regional policy and interdisciplinary reach

In this note, I address two frontiers where we, as regional scientists, can raise the visibility and impact of regional science and enlarge the community of scholars in our fold. The first is the resurgence of regionalism as a phenomenon and policy arena. My argument here is that many politicians, practitioners and citizens are actively debating the health and future of metropolitan regions, but we are not playing the intellectual role that we could be. The second frontier involves expanding the interdisciplinary reach of regional science towards the ''softer'' social and policy sciences, especially in the direction of sociology, political science, and city and regional planning. My argument here is that our tools of analysis, especially our understanding of agents and institutions, would be more powerful if amplified by selected contributions from neighboring fields. Copyright Regional Science Association International (RSAI) Urbana, USA 2002