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We start 2014 with a bumper issue of the Australasian Journal of Regional Studies. It contains one more article than usual and one of those is a magisterial survey of the state of, and prospects for, Regional Science by Gordon Mulligan, one of America's leading scholars in the field. The marriage of economics and geography in the sub-discipline of Regional Science is now 60 years old, so we've been around a long time. It is Gordon's theme, and one shared by myself and my co-editor colleague Sonya Glavac, that the subject and methodological foci of the past are likely to be modified, if not replaced, by others reflecting current economic and social concerns and imperatives. We now inhabit a multipolar and increasingly globalised world beset by rapid change and huge uncertainty borne of complexity. And that complexity reflects declining capacities of governments to manage our affairs, but looming data and analytical inadequacies when we consider that our futures are likely to look very different to even the recent past. We therefore live, to mirror an ancient Chinese curse, in interesting times where, in the words of Jack Welch – former CEO of General Electric, "If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." If we recognise the truth of this statement, Regional Science has a bright future in both analysing the changes occurring around us and assisting spatial transition to new and very different economic and social realities. It is therefore symbolic that this lead article marks the twentieth anniversary of the AJRS's founding. Let us use the occasion to rethink our field of study and reconfigure it for the start of the "Second Machine Age" heralded by Brynjolfsson and McAfee in their brilliant and recently published book of that title. We're in for a wild and exciting ride. |
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