Breaking out of the ‘Isolated State’: Views on the Status and Future of Regional Science from a European Border Region

Abstract

Against the backdrop of a perceived ‘crisis’ within the field of Anglo-American regional science, in this paper we offer a brief overview of the early engagement of regional science with the regional concept, while placing its theoretical formulations within the wider sociohistorical context of the Cold War period and the rise of positivist social science. With regard to the development of regional science as a field of enquiry with its own theoretical and empirical postulates, attention focuses on what David Harvey has referred to as a “utopianism of spatial form”, defined by the idea that spatial constructs can serve to control social processes in positive ways, thus using space to evade historical change. In building bridges from the Isardian promise of the past of regional science to its multiple futures, we suggest that the field today may break out of its current ‘isolated state’ by entering into creative dialogue with the metaphors animating three research streams: (1) an ‘analytical turn’ in Marxist economic geography; (2) a Marshallian ‘New Regionalism’; and (3) a ‘cultural turn’ perceived to be occurring within the field of radical political economy. Each stream, addressed here as a successive and broader departure from the more orthodox “utopianism of spatial form” in spatial and regional science, is briefly surveyed in turn. Drawing on the metaphor of borders and border-lands, we conclude by arguing that rather than view each research strand as an ‘improvement’ on its predecessor they should be viewed as the grounds for a potentially rich cross-fertilization between spatial science and various fields of nonorthodox economics.