Regional Worlds : Advancing the Geography of Regions

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Regional World(s): Advancing the Geography of Regions, Martin Jones ; Anssi Paasi
2. Bounded vs. Open Regions, and Beyond: Critical Perspectives on Regional Worlds and Words, Alexander B. Murohy; J. Nicolas Entrikin; Anssi Paasi; Gordon Macleod; Andrew E. G. Jonas and Ray Hudson
3. Arguing with Regions, John A. Agnew
4. Conceptualizing the Region – In What Sense Relational? Krisztina Varró; Arnoud Lagendijk
5. New Localities, Martin Jones; Michael Woods
6. Experienced Regions and Borders: The Challenge for Transactional Approaches, Maano Ramudsindela
7. Configuring the New ‘Regional World’: On being Caught between Territory and Networks, John Harrison
8. Crafting the Region: Creative Industries and Practices of Regional Space, Nicola J. Thomas; David C. Harvey; harriet Hawkins
9. Unusual Regionalism in Northern Europe: The Barents Region in the Making, Kaj Zimmerbauer
10. Between Regional Spaces and Spaces of Regionalism: Cross-border Region Building in the Spanish ‘State of the Autonomies’ Jacob García-Álvarez; Juan-Manuel Trillo-Sanatamaría
11. (Small) Differences that (Still) Matter? Cross-Border Regions and Work Place Governance in the Southern Ontario and US Great Lakes Automotive Industry, Tod D. Rutherford; John Holmes

The special issue “Regional Worlds” sees itself as a contribution to the further development of the geography of the region. It combines various current theoretical perspectives on the region with empirical examples from Europe, Africa, and America. It was developed as a synthesis of the Association of American Geographers conference held in Boston, Massachusetts in 2008.

It raises the question of how regions can be understood and conceptualized in the context of globalization, governance, identity, territory, social constructivism, and border crossing. The authors describe regions as things that have grown historically and are constantly changing in form and meaning. Keywords such as “competition,” “resilience,” and “structure” are becoming more important in the current description of regions. The issue presents both intellectual and practical aspects of Regional Studies and aims to broaden the theoretical and empirical understanding of regions through individual contributions.

The aim of the special issue is not to look at regions dichotomously either through the “relational approach” or through the “territorial approach”, but to bring these two approaches together. The authors start from the assumption that regions today are involved in open, network-like and cross-border, global relations as well as being bound, locally rooted and territorially limited. Regions are therefore “in motion and simultaneously fixed” (3).

An introduction by the editors is followed by brief reflections on the openness (relational approach) and restriction (territorial approach) of regions. This is followed by eight articles analyzing and conceptualizing regions from different empirical and theoretical contexts.

The contributions deal with “the production and reproduction of both regional spaces and spaces of regionalism” (3). The authors explore questions such as how to interpret the importance of regions, how to conceptualize regions in relation to location, territory, locality, etc., how to overcome the separation between relational and territorial interpretation of regions, how regions emerge and come into being, what borders of regions are and what socio-political functions they have, what it means to understand regions as socially constructed, what role the context plays in regional emergence and how this context changes the understanding of regions. Regions are considered here from a political perspective (e.g. the EU as a region), from an economic perspective (e.g. supranational trade regions) or from a socio-cultural perspective (e.g. subnational cultural region).

The focus of some of the contributions is rather on theory building while others show a rich empiricism. Agnew’s article, for example, argues that in the humanities the views of the region must be adapted to the respective context, since there cannot be a single regional concept due to the complexity of the contexts. Jones and Woods rethink the concept of locality and try to get a better understanding of society, space, and region. García-Álvarez and Trollo-Santamaría deal with the case study of cross-border autonomous communities in Spain and Portugal in the context of globalization, while Rutherford and Holmes deal with changes in workplace management in cross-border regions using the example of the US/Canadian automotive industry in the Great Lake region. Altogether, the contributions show innovative approaches to conceptualizing and contextualizing regions and manage to lend scientific and practical relevance to the idea of the region once again.