Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography which studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment, examples of which include urban sprawl and urban redevelopment. It analyzes spatial interdependencies between social interactions and the environment through qualitative and quantitative methods. This multidisciplinary approach draws from sociology, anthropology, economics, and environmental science, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the intricate connections that shape lived spaces.
Regional science is a field of economics concerned with analytical approaches to problems that are related specifically to regional and international issues. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to location theory or spatial economics, location modeling, transportation, trade and migration flows, economic geography, land use and urban development, inter-industry analysis such as input-output analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.
Regional planning deals with the efficient placement of land-use activities, infrastructure, and settlement growth across a larger area of land than an individual city or town. Regional planning is related to urban planning as it relates land use practices on a broader scale. It also includes formulating laws that will guide the efficient planning and management of such said regions. Regional planning can be comprehensive by covering various subjects, but it more often specifies a particular subject, which requires region-wide consideration.
Economic geography is the subfield of human geography that studies economic activity and factors affecting it. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics.
Urban economics is broadly the economic study of urban areas; as such, it involves using the tools of economics to analyze urban issues such as crime, education, public transit, housing, and local government finance. More specifically, it is a branch of microeconomics that studies the urban spatial structure and the location of households and firms.
Spatial planning mediates between the respective claims on space of the state, market, and community. In so doing, three different mechanisms of involving stakeholders, integrating sectoral policies and promoting development projects mark the three schools of transformative strategy formulation, innovation action and performance in spatial planning
Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall was an English town planner, urbanist and geographer. He was the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and president of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association. Hall was one of the most prolific and influential urbanists of the twentieth century.
Economic integration is the unification of economic policies between different states, through the partial or full abolition of tariff and non-tariff restrictions on trade.
In geography, the quantitative revolution (QR) was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science.
Regional economics is a sub-discipline of economics and is often regarded as one of the fields of the social sciences. It addresses the economic aspect of the regional problems that are spatially analyzable so that theoretical or policy implications can be the derived with respect to regions whose geographical scope ranges from local to global areas.
Doreen Barbara Massey was a British social scientist and geographer. She specialized in Marxist geography, feminist geography, and cultural geography, as well as other topics. She was Professor of Geography at the Open University.
Brian Joe Lobley Berry was a British-American human geographer and city and regional planner. He was the Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His urban and regional research in the 1960s sparked geography’s social-scientific revolution and made him the most-cited geographer for more than 25 years.
In England, spatial planning is undertaken at the national level, through the National Planning Policy Framework. The London region is the only one to have a statutory London Plan. Most planning functions are exercised by local authorities, with neighbourhood planning also taking place in some areas.
Shiba Prasad Chatterjee was a Professor of Geography at the University of Calcutta, India. He served as President of the International Geographical Union from 1964 until 1968, Chatterjee received a Murchison Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1959, and a Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 1985. He coined the name 'Meghalaya' for one of India's states.
Yehua Dennis Wei is a Chinese-American geographer. He is a professor in the Department of Geography and a senior scholar in the Institute of Public and International Affairs at the University of Utah. His research has been funded by the NSF, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, National Geographic Society, Ford Foundation and Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He has received awards for research excellence from the NSFC, Association of American Geographers' (AAG) China, Asian and Regional Development and Planning Specialty Groups, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Jan Oosterhaven is a Dutch economist, who currently is Professor of Spatial Economics at the University of Groningen. Before that, he held positions as associate and assistant professor at the same university since 1970. Between 1985 and 1986, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, teaching urban economics, and between 1998 and 1999 was as a senior consultant for TNO.
Spatial econometrics is the field where spatial analysis and econometrics intersect. The term “spatial econometrics” was introduced for the first time by the Belgian economist Jean Paelinck in the general address he delivered to the annual meeting of the Dutch Statistical Association in May 1974 . In general, econometrics differs from other branches of statistics in focusing on theoretical models, whose parameters are estimated using regression analysis. Spatial econometrics is a refinement of this, where either the theoretical model involves interactions between different entities, or the data observations are not truly independent. Thus, models incorporating spatial auto-correlation or neighborhood effects can be estimated using spatial econometric methods. Such models are common in regional science, real estate economics, education economics, housing market and many others. Adopting a more general view, in the by-law of the Spatial Econometrics Association, the discipline is defined as the set of “models and theoretical instruments of spatial statistics and spatial data analysis to analyse various economic effects such as externalities, interactions, spatial concentration and many others”. Recent developments tend to include also methods and models from social network econometrics.
The Regional Studies Association is a learned society with an international network of academics, policy makers and practitioner members. It was founded in 1965, following the foundation of the Regional Science Association in the USA and International Centre for Regional Planning and Development in the UK. Regional studies is a field of interdisciplinary research focusing on the sub-national, such as city and regional development, urbanisation, economic inequalities and migration issues. The research not only crosses the boundaries of countries, but also the disciplines of geography, economics, sociology and planning. The Association is registered with the UK Charity Commission and Companies House. The Association organises international events and various micro-grant awards.
Giuseppe Arbia is an Italian statistician. He is known for his contributions to the field of spatial statistics and spatial econometrics. In 2006 together with Jean Paelinck he founded the Spatial Econometrics Association, which he has been chairing ever since.
