What's Wrong with Economic Geography? Other Thoughts on the Rift

Trevor Barnes is to be commended for his investigations of how research and scholarship are actually practiced. In geography, his home discipline, he has revisited the origins of the so-called scientific and quantitative revolution. So it is only natural that he should turn his curiosity to the origins of regional science. In this paper, which was delivered with much eloquence and passion (I arrived just in time to hear the second hall), Barnes again exhibits enviable skill in capturing the personalities and events of past times. Rightfully so, he devotes much of his attention to Walter Isard, who made indispensable intellectual and institutional contributions to regional science from the mid 1950s to the early 1980s, when his interests turned to peace studies. Barnes weaves a Spengler-like rise and fall motif across three different entities--the person (Isard), the project (regional science), and the nation (America). These three agents are structural substitutes in a story about Isard's remarkable professional life and the beginnings of regional science at 3718 Locust Walk during the more innocent and upbeat days of the immediate post-WW II era. But, curiously enough, the story is truncated in the early 1980s when a number of prominent geographers--like Barnes, all from Britain--explicitly or implicitly renounce regional science. Furthermore, the story is in part unsatisfying because it remains so one-sided--we never do get a view of the ever-widening rift between geography and regional science from a regional scientist. So, at the end of the paper, this reader was left with three nagging questions. First, what else could have contributed to this rift between geography and regional science? Second, what has happened to regional science since the early 1980s? And third, what exactly happened at the Ambassador Hotel bar during the NARSC meetings in Chicago in 1978? I will try to address the first two of these issues, leaving the third for others that are better informed. When did the rift begin? It seems clear to me that the major impetus for the division between geography and regional science is David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973), an impressive book that has four broad claims. First, any distinction between methodology and philosophy must be rejected because theoretical verification is only achieved through social practice. Second, different versions of space are created and maintained by human practice, but largely for the benefit of the few. Third, all conventional views of social justice are problematic; furthermore, justice can never be achieved in a market-exchange society. And fourth, the embedded processes of urbanism, which serve to concentrate wealth and power, shed light on many wider issues of social and political concern. Written especially for geographers, the book calls for the dismissal of status quo and counter-revolutionary ideas and the adoption of revolutionary theories--those that are dialectically formulated and therefore offer each person the prospect of creating truth. Harvey makes some very good points in this book and it is a wonderful introduction to the topic of urbanism, one that raises important questions regarding the distribution of power and nature-society relations long before most other social theorists. He also makes the reader think a lot about housing, the nature of public goods, and the role of spillovers in dense, urban settlements. But clearly the book was largely designed to be an indictment of economic geography and regional science, as practiced at that rime, for Harvey goes out of his way to assail the foundations of neoclassical thought and the contributions of many highly-regarded social scientists. Among a litany of charges he asserts that: market exchange is largely responsible for scarcity; welfare economics is useless because it addresses neither space nor time; and stylized Thunen-type models only impede society's ability to address its various ills. …

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