Regional competitiveness, territory and the city: The research programme of an impressive mind

Abstract

Sixty years since the publication of the seminal work “Location and the Space Economy” by Walter Isard (Isard 1956), regional and urban economics has achieved full recognition as a stand-alone economic discipline able to incorporate the dimension ‘space’ into analysis of the workings of the market by including space in logical schemes, laws and models which regulate and interpret the formation of prices, demand, productive capacity, levels of output and development, growth rates, and the distribution of income in conditions of unequal regional endowments of resources (Capello 2007a). Urban economics today embraces rich and complex theories and tools able to produce general powerful representations and conceptual pictures of the city and of urban systems, of their formation and evolution (Camagni 1992a). The knowledge accumulated in these 60 years is ample, rich, and stimulating, and it is able to open a scientific mind to the interpretation of spatial phenomena.