Geographic intersections of regional science: Reflections on Walter Isard’s contributions to geography

Abstract.

In his writing, analyses, and commentaries, Walter Isard contributed significantly to economic geography, inspiring a generation of economic geographers with seminal texts on industrial location and spatial economics and methods of regional analysis – a line of argumentation that explicitly incorporated abstract economic reasoning into an otherwise largely descriptive and inventory-based subdiscipline of geography. His circumscribed view of regional development and industrial location helped precipitate the emergence of the critical turn in economic geography in the late 1970s. He was the one early modern 20^th century economics author to successfully wed economics and a certain perspective on space.