Regional Systems Analysis at UC Davis

Professor G. William Skinner Research Team
Mailing address: Department of Anthropology
One Shields Avenue, Davis,CA 95616-8522 USA
Office: 1615 Fifth Street, Davis
Telephone: 530/297-1960
Fax: 530/297-6531


An interdisciplinary research team led by professors of anthropology, geography, and history is conducting spatial analyses of regional systems in contemporary China as well as early modern Japan and France. For each project we are constructing a spatial framework, referred to as Hierarchical Regional Space (HRS), building on central place theory from Christaller and regional systems theory from von Thunen. Geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical tools facilitate modeling the core-periphery structures of macroregional systems at multiple hierarchical scales. In the societies under analysis here, the HRS model provides a useful framework for explaining the spatial variation in many demographic and ecological phenomena.

 

Projects
and Data

 

 

Selected Publications
and Presentations

 

 

Contacts
and Collaborators

 

Contemporary China

1990 Regional Systems Analysis and GIS basemap
 
Shandong Marketing Systems Analysis
 
1982-1990-2000 Census Analysis

Early Meiji Japan

Nobi Region
 
Owari Region

Early Modern France

 

China's Fertility Transition (Social Science History v23 n1)

International Workshop for Historical GIS, 2001

Association for Asian Studies 2000

Geoinformatics '99

Conceptualizing HRS
 
Analyzing the Urban Hierarchy
 
Constructing an Urban-Rural Continuum
 
Delineating Regional Systems
 
Reproductive Behavior in Time and Space

Publications by G. William Skinner

Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China
 
The City in Late Imperial China

 

G. William Skinner (gwskinner@ucdavis.edu)

Mark Henderson, Postgraduate Researcher/GIS Analyst

Yuan Jianhua, Beijing Institute of Information and Control

Tsune Mizoguchi, University of Nagoya

Ted Margadant, UC Davis History

Wei Wang, Harvard University

Lawrence Crissman, ACASIAN, Griffith University, Australia

The China Data Center at the University of Michigan

CITAS at the University of Washington

The China Historical GIS Project based at the Harvard-Yenching Library