Background: the wider context of RNSISS

Context for the Network

The analysis of space and of place has become increasingly important in understanding contemporary social change and many aspects of human behaviour. In part that is because of the uneven distributional impacts and outcomes of the processes of transformational change occurring at the international, national, regional and local levels of scale. Much research now exists investigating how processes of change—such as globalisation and technology innovation and the associated compression of space and time; the realignment of political boundaries; and the impacts of migration and of family and household structural change—operate and impact to profoundly affect the lives and behaviours of people and influence the fortunes of places. Analysing and understanding those processes, impacts and outcomes necessitates a spatially integrated approach and the development of research paradigms that more explicitly incorporate space, space-time and place dimensions.

It is also important because much human behaviour takes place in a space and a space-time context, and often in a particular place-setting, and is influenced by a wide range of social-economic institutional and objective spatial (i.e. location and place-based factors) as well as environmental elements that have a place context.

Investigating such phenomena requires a range of theoretical and methodological paradigms that incorporate spatial-based data collection, the use of spatial information technologies for data integration, and spatial modelling tools, and also it involves approaches that take a place-specific focus. Cross-disciplinary approaches are enhanced by adopting spatially integrated social science approaches to investigate and better understand the complexities of the human-environment interface.

Major advances are well underway in three sets of spatial technologies—geographic information systems, global positioning systems, and remote sensing—that provide an improved capability for new insights to understand patterns, processes and changes occurring in the widely diverse human (and natural) environments of planet earth. The adoption and diffusion of those technologies is now widespread and their integration with other spatially-specific and non-spatially-specific tools and techniques such as spatial statistics, micro-simulation, spatial econometrics, matrix analysis, location modelling—is occurring more and more.

The use of GIS-based systems to integrate diverse information and to visualise patterns in data and research outputs increasingly are being used to build spatial decision support systems to assist in policy development and program implementation and intervention. That integrating approach is referred to as Geographic Information Science. Internationally considerable advances have been made in harnessing those innovations and in applying Geographic Information Science in a wide variety of fields of scientific inquiry, but this is still relatively lacking in the social and behavioural sciences.