Innovations in Urban and Regional Systems

This book presents cutting-edge research on urban and regional systems applying modern spatial analytical techniques of Geographic Information Science & Technologies (GIS&T), spatial statistics, and location modeling. The contributions, written by leading scholars from around the globe, adopt a spatially explicit analytical perspective and highlight methodological innovations and substantive breakthroughs on many facets of the socioeconomic and environmental reality of urban and regional contexts.

The book is divided into three parts: The first part offers an introduction to the research field, while the second part discusses critical issues in urban growth and urban management, presenting case studies on city and urban environments, their growth, data infrastructures and spatial and management issues. The third part then broadens the analysis to the regional scale, addressing growth, convergence and adaptation to new economic and information-based realities. This book appeals to scholars of spatial and regional sciences as well as to policy decision-makers interested in advanced methods of spatial analysis, location modeling, and GIS&T. 

Jean-Claude Thill is a Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has been appointed High-End Foreign Expert at the School of Applied Economics of Renmin University of China in Beijing, China, where is also affiliated with the Center of Urban and Regional Economics. He is also a graduate affiliate of Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an. He holds a doctoral degree in Geography from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He serves on the editorial board of a number of international journals in geography, urban science and regional science. He served as President of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) and has been elected a Fellow of the RSAI. His research focuses on the spatial organization of socio-economic systems across scales, and his recent contributions have involved leveraging spatial data analytics (including GeoComputation) to better apprehend urban and regional systems at a finer spatio-temporal granularity.