Throughout his scholarly career, Andrew Isserman made bold calls for vision, storytelling, and narrative construction in regional science and planning. The necessity to plan and make infrastructure and development decisions with incomplete evidence often requires narratives—gists,...

This article, based on the inaugural Andrew Isserman lecture, explores whether regional science has lived up to its founder’s aspirations to create an interdisciplinary and international field to tackle key societal problems with reasoning, evidence, and sound policy recommendations. I...