Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning Zhenhua Chen has published (with Laurie A. Schintler) “Rediscovering regional science: Positioning the field's evolving location in science and society” in the Journal of Regional Science. 

We find that regional science has moved well beyond its origins, shifting away from a heavy focus on theory and abstraction to modeling/simulation, empirical analysis, and policy research. We also find that there has been increasing attention to “people” in regions and the spatial characteristics of social problems, and some important shifts in the regional science community itself, particularly in terms of patterns of collaboration and the geography of scholarship. The findings of this paper provide implications for future directions of research and education for regional science.

Read more at the Journal of Regional Science