THE HISTORY, STATUS, AND FUTURE OF REGIONAL SCIENCE - AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

This comprehensive paper examines the roots and dreams of early region al science, focusing on its scholarly association, its concepts of sci ence and region, and its claim to be a separate discipline. Regional s cience never became a science or a discipline, and it has had a peculi ar relationship to regions. Yet, it has had spectacular success as an international, interdisciplinary scholarly forum, and it has produced noteworthy contributions to several disciplines. This paper also asses ses the standing of contemporary regional science within economics, ge ography, planning, and other academic fields and points out its achiev ements and failures. It discusses the place of regional science in aca demic space, intellectual space, and real world space and proposes fut ure directions with respect to each.