REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY Anssi Paasi Department of Geography Linnanmaa 90014 University of Oulu Finland E-mail [email protected] Fax +358-8-5531703 telephone +358-8-5531693 Published in Kitchin, R & N Thrift (eds. 2009). International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier, London. Keywords Regional geography, regional knowledge, power, new regional geography, region Glossary Chorology The study of the causal relations between diverging geographical phenomena occurring within a particular region. According to Alfred Hettner and Richard Hartshorne chorological perspective aims at studying the character of regions through comprehension of the existence together and interrelations among different realms of reality and their varied manifestations. Exceptionalism An idea promoted by chorological thinkers that geography and history differ from other scientific fields because the former do not have any specific research object but rather look at the world from a specific viewpoint. Accordingly geography studies the world in relation to space, history in relation to time. This idea was based on the philosopher Kant’s classification of sciences. Geographical region Geographical region was a significant idea in traditional regional geography. It is a regional unit that the researcher identifies as a result of the research process. The representatives of traditional regional geography struggled to identify regions as bounded units that are totally separate from each other. This idea has been challenged by new regional geographers and relational thinkers. New regional geography Sub-field of human geography whose representatives are interested in the social and cultural construction of regions, in their meanings for individual and social identities and in the power relations that are involved in regionbuilding processes. 3 Region The traditional key category of geographical thinking. A spatial unit that is somehow distinguishable from the surrounding areas. It has been understood both as a mental category that can be used in classification and as a “real world unit”. For new regional geographers region is an entity based on social practice and discourse. Regionalization In traditional regional geography regionalization referred to the process of dividing space into regions. Regionalization also points to the political management of state space and e.g. the de-centralization of activities. In the global context it may refer to the proliferation of regional blocks at a supranational scale. Region-building The process through which regions and their meanings are socially constructed. Regional Geography According to a traditional definition, a sub-field of geography that studies the diversity and the organization of nature and human aspects in an integrative regional framework. Systematic geography Consists of systematic sub-fields of physical geography such as geomorphology, climatology, biogeography, and human geography such as population geography, urban geography or political geography. 4 SYNOPSIS Regional geography has been an important subfield since the institutionalization of geography as an academic field in late 19th century and even before that the founders of modern geography regarded this field crucial. Regional geography was a dominant research area in geography until 1950-60s, was then in decline until 1980s but has perpetually maintained its position in geographic education. Particularly the so-called new regional geography has brought this idea again back on agenda since the early 1980s, this time in a different way compared with the tradition. New regional geographers have theorized both the ideas of region and role of regional knowledge in the frameworks provided by both social and cultural theory and historically contingent societal conditions, that is new regional geography is not seen as a mere collection of spatial knowledge or an internal methodological problem of the geography discipline. This also means that new regional geographers are more often than not interested in the power relations associated with region-building processes, regionalization, regional identity narratives, or regional development. This is a step forward from the assumptions of traditional geography where regions were often understood on the basis of some intrinsic wholeness or unity. Regions are nowadays understood not as unique, separate entities but rather as part of broader constellations of societal power relations that frame their institutionalization and transformation. In the current mobile world regional boundaries may be open in some social practices, in some others relative closed. 5 Introduction “Regional geography – we don’t teach that any more”. This comment was posed by a senior colleague to Hugh Clout in the late 1980s when Clout mentioned that he is preparing a trend report on regional geography in the UK. Paradoxically, this comment, reminding many earlier premature declarations on the death of regional geography, was presented in the middle of a new wave of interest in regional geography in the UK, something that was to become soon also internationally recognized as ‘new regional geography’. And further, human geographers had begun to pay increasing attention to new possible ways of thinking regional geography not only in the UK, but also in many other contexts such as the US, Germany, The Netherlands or Finland, for instance. This entry will scrutinize both the long tradition of regional geography and the rise and key features of new regional geography. It aims to show how both the practice of making regional geography and regional geography as a theoretical enterprise have been deeply contested, and historically and geographically contingent. This disputability evinces the fact that both the practice of making and discourse on regional geography have been results of both societal and academic power relations. The likewise contested understanding of what the ‘region’ is has been part and parcel of these struggles. Due to these facts the prime focus of this entry is on methodological issues and respectively in tracing how contested concepts of region have been unfolded and utilized in geography. The entry will look at first the contested features and definitions of regional geography, will then trace the roots and shaping of traditional regional geography and scrutinize the forms of critique that emerged after World War II. It will then map the background and key ideas of the so-called new regional geography and the challenges it has posed to geographical thinking. Finally, the challenge of globalization to regional geographic thinking and to the idea of region will be reappraised. 6 Regional geography: a contested but necessary enterprise Regional geography has been a highly significant source for both theoretical debates and concrete research practice of geographers in the course of years. But in spite of this creditable past, the phrase ‘regional geography’ raises often mixed feelings among contemporary geographers who have enforced an increasing specialization in the field and have witnessed a philosophical, methodological and theoretical fragmentation of the discipline that has taken place since World War II. While most academic geographers doubtless appreciate the informational value of regional geography, its role in the history of the field, while many of them teach regional geography courses, and while some of them occasionally put forward pleas on the need to develop this field further, probably very few are ready to label themselves as ‘regional geographers’ today. Notwithstanding a regional emphasis may crucially inform their research, whether they are working with the region as a theoretical category or with regional issues related to such themes as urbanism (e.g. city-regions), political geography (e.g. devolution or regionalism) or cultural geography (e.g. regional identity). This in-built ambivalence is not a new feature, however. Minshull scrutinized in the late 1960s methodological problems that regional geographers simply recognized in different ways that is the methods of finding, defining, mapping and describing the region. This vagueness goes even further back to the history. Some scholars suggested already in the mid-1930s that there are nearly as many concepts of the region as there are regional geographers. Indeed, it is obvious that the perpetual debate on the idea of region has itself provided in many countries one basis to legitimate the existence of geography as a discipline in the academy and respectively the idea of region has become a major symbol for the identity of the field, a symbol that is in practice often taken for granted. For many scholars regional geography has simply been an academic territory that serves as a safeguard against the absorption of geography as part of some other academic fields. The focus of the methodological problems recognized by Minshull has changed a lot since the 1960s. 7 New interpretations on region have perpetually emerged, often claiming the status of cutting edge knowledge, just to fold soon under the flow of next ideas. However, theorizing the meanings of the region, the importance of mapping and the question of power relations hidden in regional representations have been perpetually crucial features in regional geographic studies. Also, while the idea of a specific ‘geographical region’ that was for a long time regarded as the key product of a regional geographic research process lost its importance in academic geography after World War II, the conceptualization of the region has continually motivated (regional) geographers and does still so. The geographical regions were originally traced by two different ways: by proceeding from small units to larger ones and vice versa. The idea of geographical region was not as specific as was the idea of a ‘natural region’ that was in use in many countries before World War II. Most prominent this idea was in A.J Herbertson’s (1865-1915) efforts to distinguish large scale natural regions of the world by using primarily climatic indicators. This idea was based on the supposed existence of ‘natural boundaries’. This exploitation of a physical geographic basis in the delimitation of regions manifested itself also in political geography and boundary studies, where scholars discussed so-called ‘natural boundaries’, and this idea was apparent even in political practice when state leaders and military authorities searched for such boundaries in wars. Regions and their boundaries were regarded as being dictated by nature and in the extreme case regions were regarded as organisms that expand in the same way as biological organisms. While the ideas of natural boundaries have been abandoned, current world regional geography textbooks that are important indicators of the current, institutionalized understandings of regional geography in the academia, still remind us of the tendency to divide the earth surface into such large scale components and their authors often lean on some macro-scale regional frameworks, simply to manage the complexity of versatile materials. This regionalization is almost self-evident also in area studies - think e.g. such expressions as global south, Latin America, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa or Europe. The aim of regional geographers to distinguish regional spaces is related to such perpetually important social practices as regionalization and regionalism. Regionalization as a tendency to distinguish regions 8 by dividing or integrating space is perpetually important in regional planning and in the governance of the spatiality of social life. Think, for example, the current tendency towards devolution in many states or the efforts to create supra-state institutional regional arrangements, such the EU or NAFTA. Also regionalism, a cultural or political movement drawing on regional features and interests, often draws on regional knowledge and at times on festive ideas of certain regional unity. Regionalism has been, and still is, a significant basis for science, art (painting, literature) and political movements around the world. It has also been an important source of inspiration for many traditional regional geographers, such as E.W. Gilbert. Contrary to much of traditional inwards-looking regionalism, the so-called ‘new regionalism’ that has emerged since the late 1970s, has had a more open character, being often a vehicle for regional development strategies in the world where governance and power relations are re-scaling. Both regionalism and regionalization are social practices that bring together political geographic and regional geographic aspects. The most important and long-lasting realm to apply regional geographic knowledge and at the same time to perpetuate the interest of geographers in the questions about regional geography has nevertheless been education and the production and reproduction of geographical world views in academic, educational and popular circles. Generations of students in schools and University geography departments around the world have studied regional geography courses and they still do so, whether they do this under the label regional geography, area studies or specially named courses. These fields exist in the syllabus at all levels of education, and respectively have a strong niche in academic and school geography textbook publishing market. The historical background for this is the fact that it was not only the inquisitiveness of teachers or professionals but rather the passions of state and military officials, political leaders, and nation-builders that turned round the world the attention to regional knowledge as a medium in social reproduction and in the construction of national identities. When geography entered the universities during the late 19 th century the key ideological backgrounds for this step were nationalism and colonialism. Geographic education has been exploited not only to mediate 'geographical facts' but also to construct and reproduce regional and national stereotypes and 9 at times even enemy images. This politics of representation accentuates the connection between regional geography and power. Regional geography thus has a potentially close relation to the questions of racism, peace and violence, themes studied currently by cultural, political and post-colonial geographers. The need for such research was suggested by UNESCO already after World War II. This theme is closely engaged with cartography. Perhaps in no other field of geography has the power of maps been as obvious as in regional geography. Regional depictions and narratives – that are always based in certain choices and simplifications from the complexity of the world – apparently ‘objectify’ the regional worlds they are representing, and especially powerful this effect is when these worlds are put on maps that ‘fix’ them as apparently timeless and stop the historical process that a region actually is. Regional geographic education has effectively produced and reproduced, often by leaning on cartography, the image of a homology between cultures and bounded spaces, "us" and the “Other”. Maps have been a key vehicle to naturalize the boundaries between cultural and political realms. This practice to subjugate and homogenize complex cultural relations in given spatial grids has been severely criticized not only by geographers but also by anthropologists during the last few decades. In spite of this critique the link between regional geography and education has been a surprisingly neglected theme in critical human geographic research. Defining regional geography What then is ‘regional geography’ by definition? Also this has been and still is a deeply contested question. Dickinson defined regional geography at the turn of the 1970s as the treatment of the variety of spatially distributed phenomena in a particular area, whether it is a local area, a country, or a continent – thus implying that regional geographers operate at all spatial scales. The challenge for the regional geographer is, he argued, to discover integrating processes that give some measure of identity and uniqueness to an area. For him regional consciousness and the names of regions, for instance, are important in mapping such an identity. Regional consciousness and regional identity have been 10 significant topics particularly among continental European geographers up to recent times. E.W. Gilbert regarded geography in the early 1960s as the art of recognizing, describing and interpreting the personalities of regions. Regions are not static for him: the characters of regions are constantly changing and developing. For Hart, 20 years later, the task of regional geography was to produce "evocative descriptions that facilitate an understanding and an appreciation of places, areas and regions" and regions, for their part, “are subjective artistic devices, and they must be shaped to fit the hand of the individual user”. Whereas regional geography was until 1950s the core of methodological debates in the field, a look at the past displays that the character of regional geography has since the 1960s often been discussed in nostalgic ways in Presidential or Memorial Addresses. Some of them have become widely recognized like address by Hart cited above or two addresses from the early 1960s: H.C.Darby’s talk in the IBG or E.W. Gilbert’s Herbertson Memorial Lecture. Respectively regional geography has been regarded as valuable, something that perpetually reminds us of the time when geography was supposedly characterized by some sort of unity. Indeed, the idea of region, while being a contested category, has brought along a long list of terms that have been related or appealed to this idea of unity. Such expressions as synthesis, uniqueness, total composition or complexity, compage, holism, Whole, Zusammenhang, Ganzheit, individual, totality, organism or personality, for example, have been exploited by geographers in the course of time to convince the community of geographers and perhaps also others of the power of region as a unity or an organizing principle that brings nature and culture together in a regional context. The region apparently carries for many scholars a tune of certain primordialism, hence reminding the idea of ‘community’ in sociology that has generated similar massive debates. This ideal of unity can be clearly seen from the comments of Woolridge when he suggested that the aim of regional geography is “to gather up the disparate strands of the systematic studies, the geographical aspects of other disciplines, into a coherent and focused unity, to see nature and nurture, physique and personality as closely related and interdependent elements in specific regions”. 11 The roots of regional geography The roots of regional geographic thinking are often traced back to the Classical period and scholars such as Strabo (63/64 BC – ca. AD 24) are recognized as forefathers of chorographic thinking. Chorography comes from khŏros, place, and graphein, writing, thus meaning literally writing about place. The founders of modern geography, the Germans Alexander von Humboldt (1760-1859) and Carl Ritter (1779-1859) were both developing comparative methods for geography, a field that was based on empirical work. Whereas Humboldt developed his research perspectives in the tradition of natural science by collecting data and making generalizations, Ritter was more committed to a historical approach and tried to identify separate regions, to find a unity in diversity. Humboldt’s Kosmos and Ritter’s massive series on comparative geography, Erdkunde are often recognized as the founding works of modern geography. Whereas Humboltd is seen the father of systematic geography, Ritter was the key person to develop regional geography. This division between general or systematic geography and special or regional geography has long roots that many scholars are ready to trace back to the classic work Geographia Generalis written by the German Bernhard Varenius in the 17th century. These two sub-areas have not been regarded as separate fields of inquiry but constituted a unity for many scholars and both have been regarded significant for geographic research. ****Fig 1 approximately here Regional geography has been a crucial notion in geography since the field became an institutionalized academic subject at the end of the 19th century. It has had somewhat different meanings and trajectories in various national contexts but what was common in many contexts was that the first ‘geographers’ were recruited from others fields, like geology or biology. The idea of region and regional geography seemed to provide a basis for a disciplinary identity and for many geographers working in French, German or North American universities it was for a long time the core or 'crown' of the discipline, a synthetic approach and 12 principle that intended to bring together the formally separate sub-areas of systematic branches of geography, such as geomorphology, climatology, biogeography, urban, economic or social geography. It may be generalized that since the institutionalization of geography regional geography dominated over systematic approaches until 1940s-50s, and since then systematic approaches have gradually taken a dominant position but this has not led to the ousting of regional geography. Contrary to the current tendency where Anglo-American theories and approaches are argued to dominate international human geography, the origin of regional geography in the US and in the UK, for instance, mirrored the developments in Germany and France, two academic contexts where many geographers are ready to locate the roots of modern geography. Clout points out that in the UK, for example, most lecturers in university departments during the 1930s-1950s derived their inspiration for regional geography from the French classics. Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918), the founder of modern French geography argued emphatically for regional geography as the core of the discipline. In France the ideal context for the then popular regional monographs were the pays, small scale regional units that corresponded to a distinctive landscape assemblage based on the close connection between the human beings and their physical environment, and on the ways of life (genre de vie) that emerged from this relation. It was supposed that this unity was significant for the strong identification of inhabitants. The study of such unique regions was seen as the key task of the geographer. The French geography was characterized by a relatively high degree of unity before World War II, a fact based on the predominating influence of Vidal. Vidal’s approach was inductive and historical, but in some other contexts the key arguments behind regional geography where more theoretically grounded. Especially the representatives of chorological thought, such as Alfred Hettner (1859-1941) in Germany, Richard Hartshorne (1899-1992) in the USA and also many other scholars in Germany, Russia, Japan, Belgium and Switzerland based their arguments on the principle of the division of labor between scientific fields. Both Hettner in his Die Geographie, ihre Geschichte, ihr Wesen un Ihre Methoden (1927) and Hartshorne, following Hettner in 13 his The Nature of Geography (1939) were drawing on the philosopher Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) classification of sciences where geography together with history were distinguished from other fields because, contrary to other academic fields, they did not have any particular research object that would characterize the field. Rather it was their approach that distinguished them from other fields. According to this thinking, often labeled as exceptionalist, history was looking at the world in relation to time, geography in relation to space. *****Fig. 2 approximately here For chorologists regional geography was a way to realize the geographical method that is to study the natural and human world according to their spatial arrangement and areal differentiation and to map causal relationships of an assemblage of phenomena at a certain region. Accordingly the region was regarded as a crucial element for the identity of the discipline as a synthetic field but also instrumental for the analysis of the differentiation of the earth surface. Alfred Hettner’s theoretical contemplations suggested a close relation between regional and systematic geography. His reasoning on geography as a chorological science of regions was paving the way for research, and a number of scholars were following his ideas with great interest. Contrary to France, German geographers were not studying primarily Germany and its areas but often carried out regional research overseas. Much time has been devoted by traditional geographers to reflect whether regional geography should be regarded as a part of the proper science of geography or whether this should be rather seen as a form of art or applied geography. This debate characterized especially the pre-quantitative tradition of geography, summarized e.g. by Hartshorne in his Perspectives on the nature of geography in the late 1950. He reminded that we should not confuse the regional concept and the regional method with what we in common call regional geography, since the former are used in fact at every level of geographic study, along the continuum from that of the study of the most elementary integrations (the extreme topical approach) to that of maximum integration (the extreme regional approach). The confusion results from 14 the fact, Hartshorne noted, that we employ the word region for a number of different concepts, each of which bears a different relation to the contrast between topical and the regional approach. In several countries regional, historical and landscape geographers devoted much time to ponder over what a good regional geography would consists of. In some contexts, like in France, a classical regional monograph became highly significant and practicing regional geography was regarded as a very exacting task where scientific knowledge, cartographic skills, and literary art were brought together. Some scholars, like the German Alfred Kirchhoff tried to create a rather mechanistic scheme (Das Länderkundliche Schema) for carrying out regional geography. Another German Hans Spethman rejected this schema and struggled to create a dynamic regional geography concentrating on forces that were shaping the regions of the earth. Regional geography has been a crucial notion also in relation to another key category, landscape. Whereas in the English language usage landscape is above all a visual category, in the German and Scandinavian context, for example, region and landscape have been brought together in such categories as Landschaft or Landskap. This idea has not merely been developed in this context but was also adopted by some historical geographers elsewhere. Most prominent representative of such thinking in the USA was Carl Ortwin Sauer, who suggested that the task of geographers is to trace the transformation of natural landscapes into cultural landscapes and the areal connections of this process. In this approach he developed further the ideas suggested earlier by the German geographer Otto Schlüter. The relation between region and landscape brings in the question of art, both in the sense of skills and artistic and aesthetic representation. These problems were discussed by many authors in France, England, Germany or Finland, for example. This theme was significant particularly in German geography, perhaps reflecting the dominating continental hermeneutic and interpretative philosophical tradition and neo-Kantianism. At the extreme were some German geographers like Ewald Banse (1833-1953) who claimed that a creative geography should be artistic and he wrote even a small book on geography and 15 expressionism in 1920. Hettner, who also himself discussed the relations between science, art and aesthetics in many publications, labeled Banse as the enfant terrible of geography, who believes that he is geography’s Schopenhauer. An interesting detail in the history of the discipline is that also such towering German figure in natural science as Alexander von Humboldt recognized the importance of artistic description. Similarly the father of political geography, anthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel (18441904) discussed extensively the role of art in understanding nature in his posthumously published book Über Naturschilderung. E.W. Gilbert suggested in the UK that “regional geography is an art comparable with other arts; both poetry and painting can and do portray landscape…if (geographers A.P.) are to make their regions vivid and alive, they should possess something of the expressive and sensuous imagination of poets and painters…”. Hartshorne, for his part, was much more categorical in his opinion in 1959 and claimed that “Effective description in geography …involves no small degree of art, not in the sense of subjective impressions, but in the objective sense of discernment and insight based on knowledge of those relationships that can be known”. The issue on the artist character of regional geography was hence raised by a number of scholars in various countries and it has been significant also later in so-called literary geography where e.g. novels and poems are continually crucial materials in the efforts of geographers to understand and represent regional diversity. The decline of traditional regional geography The fate of regional geography was again different in various countries after World War II. In the US and UK systematic approaches drawing on new theoretical, law-seeking approaches, quantitative methods and statistical data soon took the leading position in the analysis of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing capitalist state and this lead to a decline and replacement regional geography as a research field. Human geography gained new applied, instrumental forms. The gradual decline of traditional regional geography as an academic subject was based on several backgrounds. Along with the rise of systematic areas in geography, the development of quantitative methods and the adoption of new positivist philosophies, the representatives of this "new geography" formulated a critique of regional 16 geography. Old concerns on the subjective judgments hidden in the methods regional geography and on the ‘incestuous’, inwards looking exceptionalist approach were taken into a new level when they were combined with the philosophical claims of positivist conception on scientific explanation. In a way, the traditional geographical perspective was now separated from ‘concrete ground’: it was abstract spatial relations, networks, and forms of interaction that were studied in order to recognize general patterns, not the unique and static material features of regions. Fred K. Schaefer, a refugee from Nazi-Germany to the US, challenged already in 1953 in his posthumous text the descriptive regional geographic approach by suggesting that “it seems to me that as long as geographers cultivate its systematic aspects, geography’s prospects as a discipline of its own are good indeed... I am not so optimistic in case geography should reject the search for laws, exalt its regional aspects for its own sake and thus limit itself more and more to mere description”. In the same spirit Abler, Adams and Gould, for instance, wrote in 1971 in their much used textbook Spatial Organization: A geographer's view of the world that "For a long time, geographers tended to believe that internally homogeneous regions, based on one or a number of place characteristics, existed independently of the principles which defined them, and that regions themselves were intrinsically worthy of delimitation and study" and that by the time of World War II, "it was about that time that geographers realized that further progress in geography depended upon generalization and analysis at levels more advanced than classification”. Some representatives of new quantitative geography had a very negative view of the past. Peter Gould moaned in late 1970s that “with the exception of one or two works of scholarship in historical geography it was practically impossible to find a book that could be put into the hands of a scholar in another discipline without feeling ashamed”. New spirit rapidly spread also to geography departments outside the US and UK: what were important were models, relative spaces and distances. This shift was interpreted in highly progressive terms and rhetoric as the most fundamental change in the history of geography since, as Abler, Adams and Gould suggested, it opened an almost infinite number of new worlds to explore and map. In locational analysis 17 regions still existed but they became now sort of data-bound cells in the spatial matrix that could be classified and analyzed by statistical methods and regionalization increasingly became classification and making taxonomies. It is important to recognize in this context the early, seminal role of such theoretical German scholar as Walter Christaller (1893-1969), Walter Isard (1919-) in the USA, as well as the works of Torsten Hägerstrand (1916-2004) in Sweden, who all were pioneering quantitative and theoretical geography, and regional science. In spite of his important role in this context, Hägerstrand was also deeply interested in the value of regional geographic perspectives. In France the regional geographic style and the regional monograph as the crown of scholarship, both created very much in the Vidalian spirit, was still strong after World War II and it took longer to replace them by new approaches. This is an interesting delay, since as noted by Thrift, already during the heydays of the Vidalian geography the ways of life of the French peasantry were disappearing under the onslaught of capitalism and the activities of French state. The 1960s heralded an active debate in France on the purpose and methods of regional geography and on the substance of human geography and the emphasis was turning towards questions of interaction and spatial distribution patterns. But as been shown by Paul Claval, the region and regional geography still have a role to play in this context. The rise of new theoretical and quantitative approaches did not mean the end of regional geography in the 1950s-1960s. This persistence was based on the many roles of regional geography. Regional knowledge was and still is incessantly crucial in schools and higher education. The ideas of region and the potential future roles of regional geography have been discussed frequently in geography journals, at times in connection with geography teaching, at times in connection with discussions about the methodologies of geography. Pleas for a balance between regional geography and a new technical and quantitative approach were also set forth already in the late 1960s when regional geography was declared dead among the representatives of new spatial science. It is also to be noted that in spite of the major upheavals in geographical research practice, a strong regional undercurrent remained in the Northern American cultural geography where certain forms of regional geography perpetually existed in 18 the studies of vernacular regions and regional identities. In Germany some representatives of the strong tradition of Sozial Geographie developed regional perspectives further but quantitative approaches diffused also to this context. The early 1970s witnessed a lively debate on the roles of regional geography in Germany, partly reflecting the generational gap, and many authors claimed that regional geography is perpetually needed. Since the late 1980s the region and regional approaches have been important in German geography and geographers have studied e.g. the hermeneutic roots of regional geography and the everyday life regionalization. British and Dutch geographers organized a bi-national symposium at the turn of the 1990s to develop new approaches in regional geography. The emergence of “new regional geography” One of the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions in traditional regional geography - and one key for understanding how such questions differ from the theoretical discussions raised later in new regional geography - has been, whether regions do 'really exist' that is they are visible and demonstrable realities or are they merely ideas or 'subjective artistic devices', mental entities which geographers develop and use in the classification of the variety of the world. This topic was discussed extensively by Hartshorne and many later authors. For some scholars like George Kimble, the idea of region was vague because “it does not exists in reality” – an argument that also Hartshorne used to characterize the nature of geography. For Hartshorne regions are neither objects nor phenomena of the material world but rather creations of the student’s mind and thoughts. Region is an absolute space and abstract field of experience where things and processes exist. There were two forms for such constructions. The generic region corresponded to the positivist mode of classification whereas the specific, unique region forming the core of the exceptionalist thesis has been more problematic. Indeed, such questions on the nature of region are perhaps more problematic than they superficially taken seem to be and also help us to understand some features of new regional geography. A logical step further is to question, what kind of philosophical and methodological engagements we have when 19 answering to such questions? So, does the ontological aspect deeply involved in the question on the nature of regions refer merely to the problem of empirical observation, so that the existence of regions would be based only on the ability of researchers to 'find' regions. The implications of such modes of thought have prevented for a long time the development of geographer's concepts of region also in some other respects. Central problems have been the understanding of regions as non-historical frames or containers, in which the various phenomena of nature and culture are arranged and the reduction of regions as mental categories, which the researcher creates on the basis of his or her research motives. A theoretically oriented new regional geographer does not limit the question on the nature of regions merely to problems of classification or definition as such. A far more challenging question is that the ontology of the region claims scholars to trace abstractions by which they can reveal the crucial aspects of the regionality phenomenon and, finally, to 'draw' the regions which have been produced, reproduced and maybe ultimately destroyed within various social and cultural practices and discourses, as objects of concrete research. For a new regional geographer both the questions and answers regarding the existence and manifestation of regions are inevitably based on social practice. Respectively the representatives of new regional geography have been interested in power relations, practices and discourses in which people, social communities and classes produce and reproduce 'regions' and localities in their daily life through diverging institutionalized practices, such as politics, administration, economy, education, media and communication, and so on. This complexity shows that new regional geographers often adopt an emancipatory interest. Hence there is a fundamental step from - to use the concepts of Jürgen Habermas – a technical interest on knowledge to a practical (hermeneutic) and an emancipatory one, from solely collecting and presenting information on the facts of the 'objective regional world' to exploit it as a technical device in the control of nature and society, to the understanding of the social and cultural practices and power relations in the region-building processes and ultimately to determining the social and psychological fetters which confine society and in this way to mastery over them to release people from their control. 20 Respectively geographers have been forced to re-think the question of the 'objectivity' of regions and to understand them as processes that are performed, limited, symbolized and institutionalized through numerous practices, discourses and power relations that are not inevitably bound with some specific scale but may indeed ‘stretch’ both in time and space. A typical feature in new regional geography has been that it does not prefer any specific scale: the understanding of regions claims for recognizing and analyzing the processes which take place in and between various scales. This is a useful perspective for understanding the complexities of current spatialities and the inherent relations of power. The emphasis on historical approaches, on the other hand, has not meant merely 'to take history seriously' or emphasis on past processes but instead the problematization of the assumptions concerning society, human beings and social change. The works of many new regional geographers display that there is no reason to distinguish between historical and other geographies. Regions and the making of them are processes. Whereas traditional regional geographers studied regional worlds consisting of a supposedly rich mosaic of regional entities, the challenge for the revival of regional geography was to develop methodological approaches to study broader social and spatial transformations taking place in the world characterized by the increasing dynamics of the globalizing capitalism. Many scholars paid now attention not only to the fact that regions and region-building processes are materially embedded and constituted and ‘stretching’ across supposed regional borders. They also looked at the regionalities and regionalization of social and everyday life. Some geographers began to consider carefully such questions as the sense of belonging, structures of feeling, loyalties or mobilization of memory in the regional context. Regions and regionality thus began to appear as being constructed in the dialectics of materiality and individual and social imagination. Since all these are in flux in the globalizing world, this forced scholars to develop new perspectives for regional research and to look seriously at the achievements in social and cultural theory. This transformation and re-orientation took place during the 1970-80s. The first echoes of new approaches emerged in the late 1970s. In the middle of the dominant positivist approaches and the emerging humanistic and Marxist critiques, Derek Gregory set forth in his Ideology, Science and Human 21 Geography (1978) that "Ever since regional geography was declared to be dead - most fervently by those who had never been much good at it anyway - geographers, to their credit, have been trying to revive it in one form or other...This is a vital task". He suggested in the spirit of the emerging Marxist language that the challenge of the geographer is to study the constitution of specific, regional social formations, articulations and transformations. Following such pleas to study regions in theoretically informed ways, 'new regional geography' became an important category during the 1980s. This label, proposed by Thrift in 1983 became popular along with Gilbert's review in Progress in Human Geography in 1988. Gilbert brought together various theoretical perspectives on region from both the English and French speaking geography, such as the Marxist and humanistic approaches, and approaches based on the theories of practice. Theories of practice in particular directed human geographer’s theoretical attention towards the works of some sociologists. Especially significant sources of inspiration were the structuration theory developed by the British sociologists Anthony Giddens and the theories of practice developed by the French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu. While some geographers saw new regional geography simply as a project 'coming from the left', Gilbert made a distinction between three different approaches in ‘new regional geography’. The first approach may be labelled as ‘materialist’ and it looks at the spatial organization of social processes associated with a specific mode of production and it concentrates on the political-economic basis of regions. It puts stress on the roles the logic of capital circulation within these social processes. This interpretation was typical for geographers who adopted a Marxist viewpoint. Perhaps the most illustrative examples were some Doreen Massey’s works from the late 1970s. For her the region was a consequence of uneven economic development and capital accumulation. She wrote in 1978 how "The process which is suggested here begins from the process of accumulation and analyses the production of spatially uneven development without any pre-specified regionalization of that space. From analysis on accumulation, it produces concepts of geographical organization in terms of the spatial division of labour... In general terms, there is 22 probably an increasing degree of agreement that analysis should start from accumulation rather than regions". The second approach identified by Gilbert begins from the region as a setting for social interaction and typically argues that this setting or medium plays a fundamental role in the production and reproduction of social relations. Respectively space (as well as time), its symbolic and ideological dimensions and its material basis (nature, economy) are understood as social and cultural constructs. Space and spatial patterns are not independent of social, cultural and natural processes. Space is not a causal power which would as such determine social processes. Rather social (and cultural) and spatial are constituents and outcomes of each other. The representatives of the second approach have been typically inspired by the ideas ‘structuration theorists’, mainly Anthony Giddens or have developed their own ideas on this basis. In general, these approaches accentuate the need to recognize how agency and societal institutional structures are produced and reproduced in a dialectical process and how diverging power relations are involved in this process (see the entry on structurationist geography). The first example of the use of these approaches is Pred’s theoretical effort to figure out place or region – he did not make any distinction between the two! as historically contingent processes. Pred combined a structuration theoretic viewpoint with Torsten Hägerstrand’s time geography and draw also on Vidalian thoughts on the importance of local milieu as a context shaping people’s ways of life. His empirical examples were based on the historical geography of Sweden and the daily life patterns of local peasants. Another example is Paasi’s work on the institutionalization of regions. For him region is a social process with a beginning and end. From this process he conceptualized four abstractions: territorial, symbolic and institutional shaping and the establishment of the region in the regional system and social consciousness. In social practices, such as economy, politics, governance, media or education, regions receive their boundaries that are important as social institutions and symbols rather than as physical lines. Similarly the often contested symbolism of regions is created and the institutional practices that are crucial in the maintenance of territorial and 23 symbolic shapes. Regions, their boundaries, symbols and institutions are hence not results of autonomous and evolutionary processes but expressions of a perpetual struggle over the meanings associated with space, representation, democracy and welfare. Paasi’s studies analysed the construction and meaning making of regionality in the case of Finnish provinces and later the Finnish national state. The third approach identified by Gilbert stresses culture as the prime point of departure, concentrating on problems such as regional identification and regional identities. Region is therefore understood primarily as a set of cultural relations between a specific group and a particular place; it is a people-bound category, thought not inevitably bound with individuals but rather with social communities. Human geographers interpret these kinds of themes nowadays by referring to the idea of place rather than region. Along with the rise of humanistic geography place became a significant category, but the usage of this category has expanded since the 1990s so that the element of experience accentuated by humanists like Yi-Fu Tuan or Edward Relph is not any more the key dimension. It is rather the socially constructed character of place and the power geometries that are involved in this construction that draw the attention of scholars. Another important idea that is associated with new regional geography that is ‘regional identity’, does not refer to any search for separate, unique regions. What is important is the process through which such identity narratives are created and how they are used by individuals and institutional in the networks of power manifesting themselves in social and cultural life. Overall, 'new regional geography' has been a diffuse phenomenon which became obvious already in the late 1980 when the first reviews on this area appeared. It is still a somewhat ambivalent brand: while many authors have noted the need to re-conceptualize region and place, very few have suggested, indeed, a new regional geography. It may thus well be argued that new regional geography has not become a coherent approach. Rather this is an umbrella term for research and for reflecting how region and/or place are constituted by and constitutive of social life, social relations and identity. As we have seen above, one important and dynamic feature of regional geographic thinking since its infancy has been methodological discussions regarding the concept of region, the processes of regionalization etc. 24 The arguments of 'new regional geographers' are merely one fold of this seemingly never ending discourse. It is hence no wonder, that some authors like Ron Johnston have been ready to claim, that rather than a 'new regional geography', we actually need a more developed study of 'regions in geography'. Regional geography and the concepts of region Language plays a key role in scientific practice. Scientific facts, arguments and theories are mostly constructed, communicated and evaluated in the form of written statements, which simply means that scientific work is largely a literary and interpretative activity. The understanding of what are the key categories in scientific discourse is historically and spatially contingent, not merely because these categories are embedded in different languages but also because of different institutional contexts where scientific work is carried out and because of existing societal and academic power relations. Even if theories may travel from one context to another, in social sciences they are at least partly context dependent. What German geographers, for instance, have meant by region and how regional geography has been recognized and practiced in this context has partly differed from the British, French or Finnish context. Preston James once wrote that words, whether they are technical ones or not, are valuable only as symbols standing for ideas or concepts. In geography region, place, space and some other related categories, such as location, distance and direction have been identified as such key categories. As we have seen above, region has doubtless been the most powerful concept in geography, since it has been the central intellectual problem as to both the concrete research process, the presentation of results (maps, pictures, text) and the philosophy and methodology of the discipline that is theoretical arguments for research frames and the concepts employed. One important feature of new regional geography has been the fact that along with its rise, the terminology of regional geography has become broader, but not inevitably less ambivalent than in the past. It has not been merely the region that has been scrutinized 25 but also the concepts of place and space. All too little serious research has been done on the possibilities to conceptualize region and place together to reveal the complex dynamics of social world. Even for many new regional geographers the meanings of region and place are more or less similar or overlapping. Human geographers use simultaneously several different concepts of region, which may be roughly categorized into the three categories. Pre-scientific concept of region means that researchers do not problematize the meanings of regions. This is typical in applied research which is tailor made e.g. for planning bodies or other regional authorities that simply give the ‘regions’ (e.g. statistical units) for researchers. Discipline centered regions are defined by researchers by using e.g. the uniformity of characteristics, homogeneity of content or functional coherence as their criteria. In critical interpretations regions are recognized as manifestations of often conflicting, social, political and cultural practices and discourses. Even if it is still the critical geographer who abstracts and 'creates' the ideas of the major dimensions of regions and their formation, these abstractions are explicitly created to reveal the mechanisms, processes and power relations of the social, political, economic and cultural worlds. Discipline-centered perspective regards regions as objects (e.g. traditional Landschaft geography), or as results of research process, often formal classifications of diverging empirical elements. These perspectives are often used to legitimize a specific 'geographical perspective' - hence the theoretical debates on whether regions are 'real' units or imagined, mental categories. These debates are not only a historical curiosity but fitting illustrations of the struggle over legitimate conceptualizations. The resulting 'regions' are also examples of academic socialization and power/knowledge relations. These regions also show the power of geography: once 'invented', they can be powerful in shaping the spatial imagination and actions of researchers. Critical approaches on region emerge from social practice, relations and discourse. They aim at conceptualizing and scrutinizing current spatialities as part of wider network of cultural, political and 26 economic processes, and social divisions of labour. Most studies labeled as 'new regional geography' belong to this category, e.g. those mapping individual and social identities and those regarding regions as manifestations of capital accumulation or settings for interaction. While these approaches have been normally pursued separately, a critical regional geography should ideally combine the political economic approaches and the questions of subjectification and identity formation. Further, the view on regions as processes stresses both the importance of a historical perspective in understanding them as part of broader regional transformation and the conceptualization of the scales of history in each case. The way we understand and conceptualize region, may hence have a profound effect on how we shape and experience regional development, globalization, and the world. Challenging bounded regions A stable and somehow fixed image of traditional regional geography seems to have become a caricature that is over and over taken up by the representatives of newer approaches. Respectively new approaches often accentuate the missing historical reflexivity, bounded character of regions or fixity and inwards looking orientation in the tradition. It is nevertheless important to recognize that a certain relational emphasis has also been raised up earlier in the history of regional geographical thought, even if the strive to develop regional geography often manifested itself in the search for regional unity and coherence, thus ‘arresting’ the spatial complexity into a specific form. Kimble, for instance, noted after World War II that regional geographers may perhaps be trying to put boundaries that do not exist around areas that do not matter! But think also the following citations, taken from Hartshorne (1939) and Broek (1965) which display that these thinkers were not merely looking at hermetically sealed bounded spaces: "The problem of establishing the boundaries of a geographic region...presents a problem for which we have no reason to even hope for an objective solution... The most that we can say is that any particular unit of land has significant relations with all the neighboring units and that in certain respects it may be more closely related with a particular group of units than with others, but not necessarily in all respects." 27 "Whatever the kind of place, we must always keep in mind its position in time as well as its location in space. A place cannot be understood by merely observing the interaction of present day forces. Knowing the legacy of the past and sensing the presence of change are essential qualities of the geographic mind. As to location, no place exists in isolation. We must, therefore, look beyond the internal nature of the are itself (the site) to perceive its external relations with other areas (the situation)". The relatively open character of regions was clear also to the representatives of spatial approaches. Peter Haggett, for example, regarded functional, nodal regions as open systems in the mid-1960s. He suggested that an analysis of the build up of such systems would require at first an analysis of movements, the channels along which movements occur, networks, nodes and their organization in a hierarchy and that this complex system ultimately forms surfaces that we can identify. Currently important social scientific terms like networks and movement/mobility were thus identified as important spatial categories in understanding spatial patterns. While scholars like Fred Lukermann recognized in the 1960s that the character of the places of the earth is always emergent and becoming, the relational complexities of practices and power involved in region-building processes were not yet accentuated. What is then the role of regions and regional geography in a globalizing world characterized by new regional and scalar divisions of space in economy and culture, processes of regional integration, reorganization and re-scaling of regional governance, regionalization processes and place marketing and image-building? Some scholars have suggested that if geographers want to contribute to globalization debates, regional geography has to be revived. Respectively some of them have shaped the global regional geographies of the world system, some others the regional worlds of economic production, often in the context of city-regions. Still some others have taken more political steps. Such representatives of relational thinking as Doreen Massey suggest that regions should be seen as non-bounded in the mobile world and that the opening of borders is a challenge for a progressive science and politics. This is thus as much a political message as 28 scientific. It is based on the challenges posed by the fact that – compared with the traditional efforts to create distinctive ‘geographical regions’ – most (con)temporary regions 'stretch' in space so that their social contents and relations are networked across borders and this networking indeed re-modifies and re-constitutes regions - regional boundaries and identities do not need to be exclusive and permanent. Contrary to efforts of traditional regional geographers to find a certain unity for regions, new regional geographers want to challenge any taken for granted essence of regions. This sort of new, more open regional geography is certainly a challenge for both geographic education and research. The problem is that while in some cases boundaries are quite insignificant, in some other cases they are more persistent and can not be erased very easily. This was also the idea of boundary that many traditional regional geographers had in their mind when they tried to distinguish and classify ‘unique’ regional spaces. Certain boundedness is obvious in the fact that many regions are territories that are used particularly in governance and hence are made socially meaningful entities. This means, by definition, that boundaries have a constitutive role in the management and control of social action. The importance of regions and their boundaries as catalysts for regionalist movements and for planning strategies is also obvious in some contexts. This is evident in the case of many ethno-territorial groups but identity narratives produced and reproduced e.g. by regional activists, media and governmental bodies are also typical examples of this politics of distinction. And such social movements hardly regard their own activities as regressive, while others may do so. All this is very obvious but what is needed next is the re-thinking of what are ‘boundaries’. Many relational thinkers apparently lean on a normal political geographic understanding of boundaries as dividing lines between social entities. It was suggested above that regions receive their boundaries in institutionalized practices and that these boundaries are important as social institutions and symbols, not as physical lines. This has important implications for both a political geographic and regional geographic understanding on boundaries and regions and makes it easier to understand their persistence. This namely implies that boundaries do not locate merely on border areas but may be everywhere in a region, 29 in diverging social practices, ideologies and discourses. This idea becomes obvious in such national and regional examples as flagging days, regional media, education, regional novels, electoral districts and voting, or sports events, practices that are constitutive of the region and identity building – and boundaries! Regional boundaries are thus not bounding the practice in some abstract way but it is rather the practices that produce and reproduce such boundaries. This simply means that a crucial task for regional geographers is to study in each case how the existing ideas of ‘difference’ are produced and reproduced in material and discursive practices. Positing of difference as itself problematic and searching for how this is produced and reproduced may be more fruitful than simply ignoring the role of ‘boundedness’ in social life. Conclusion Regional geography has been a variegated and historically contingent sub-area of geography, both as a concrete research field and as an object of theorization. It was important in many countries until 1950-60s and since that has been in decline in academic research but has maintained its role in both school geography and higher education. Particularly the so-called new regional geography that emerged during the 1980s brought regional geography and the region back on agenda in theoretical debates, this time in a different way compared with the tradition. New regional geographers have theorized both the ideas of region and role of regional knowledge in the frameworks provided by social and cultural theory and historically contingent societal conditions that is new regional geography is not merely a collection of spatial knowledge or an internal methodological problem for the discipline of geography. The representatives of this approach have started to consider during the last 10-15 years or so, how to perform this new regional geography. Most scholars suggest that this takes best place by exceeding the traditional boundaries between social sciences and humanities. Respectively scholars have been interested in the power relations associated with region-building processes, regional identity narratives, or regional development. Along with the rise of new regional geography also some other traditional themes have been developed further, above all the question of scale and the role of historical approaches. 30 Regions are nowadays regarded by new regional geographers as complicated institutional structures, indeed 'institutional facts', because they are dependent on human agreement and on such social institutions as political organization, governance, economy, media or education system. Most of these institutions operate across scales, which challenges traditional ideas of regions as separate, bounded units. This boundedness is not of course an either or question. In the current mobile world regional boundaries may be open in some social practices, in some others relative closed. Actors, institutions and organizations involved in the territorialization and meaning making of space may act both inside and outside of regions. Making such regions always includes normative components because institutional structures are structures of rules, power and trust, in which boundaries, symbols and institutions merge through material practice. Once created, they are also social facts in the sense that they can generate and are generated by action as long as people believe in their existence and they have a role in publicity spaces (e.g. in media) or in governance. This action, for its part, may be reproductive, resistant or transformative at the same time. Thought regional geography lost its academic status during the 1950-60s and even if new regional geography represents a new theoretically informed perspective on regional geography, traditional code still often manifests itself in the textbooks on regional geography, where the regions, created and classified by the researchers, are often described without contextual interpretation. One perpetual challenge for regional geographers is to deconstruct the 'geographical' assumptions and inclusions/exclusions that such regions imply at various spatial scales. Textbooks therefore often reproduce the historical meaning of geography: ge (earth) and grapho (to write or describe). Of course we should not deny the cultural role of this information: whatever the critique says, regional geography is also in this traditional, rather technical sense important for our world views. But a critical understanding of the problems of this approach is important. The key is to recognize the versatile and complex chiasm of power and regional geography. This simply means that a critical regional geography is also political 31 geography. Further reading Allen, J., Cochrane, A., and Massey D. (1998). Rethinking the region. London: Routledge. Broek, J.O. M. (1965). Geography: Its scope and spirit. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Claval, P. (1998). An Introduction to Regional Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Clout, H. (1989). Regional Geography in the United Kingdom: a trend report. In Paul, L.J. (ed.) Post-War Development of Regional Geography. Nederlandsche Geografische Studies 86, pp. 25-41. Utrecht. Entrikin, J. N. (1981) Philosophical issues in the study of regions: In Herbert, D.T. & Johnston, R.J. (eds.) Geography and the Urban Environment. Progress in Research and Applications, Vol. VI. John Wiley & Sons. Gilbert, A (1988). The new regional geography in the English and French speaking countries. Progress in Human Geography 12, 208-228. Grigg, D. (1967). Regions, models and classes. In Chorley, R. & Haggett, P. (eds.): Models in Geography. pp. 461-509. London: Methuen. Gilbert E.W. (1960). The idea of the region. Geography 45, 157-175. Gould, P. (1979). Geography 1957-77: The Augean period. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69, 139-151. Gregory, D. (1978). Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Hart, J.F. (1982). The highest form of geographer's art. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72, 1-29. Hartshorne, R. (1939). The Nature of Geography. Lancaster, PE: Association of American Geographers. Hartshorne, R. (1959) Perspective on the nature of geography. Chicago: RandMcNally. Johnston, RJ. (1991) A Question of Place. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnston, R.J., Hauer, J., and Hoekveld G.A. (1990) Regional Geography. Current Development and 32 Future Prospects. London: Routledge Jones, M. and MacLeod G. (2004). Regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the English question. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29, 433-452. Kimble, G.H.T. (1951). The inadequacy of the regional concept. In Dudley Stamp, L & S.W.Woolridge (eds.). London Essays in Geography. London. Massey, D. (1978). Regionalism: some current issues. Capital and Class 6, 106-126. Minshull, R. (1967) Regional Geography: Theory and Practice. London: Hutchinson. Paasi, A. (1986). The institutionalization of regions: a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity. Fennia 164, 105-146. Paasi, A. (2002) Region and Place: regional worlds and words. Progress in Human Geography 26, 802811. Pred, A. (1984) Place as historically contingent process: structuration and the time-geography of becoming places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74, 279-297. Schaefer, F. K. (1953). Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological examination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 43, 226-49. Thrift, N. (1994). Taking aim at the heart of the region. In Gregory, D., Martin, R. and G.Smith (eds). Human Geography. pp. 200-231. London: Macmillan. Woolridge, S.W. (1965). The Geographer as Scientist. London: Thomas Nelson. Cross references Region, regionalism, regionalization, structurationist geography, place, space, Hartshorne, R, Hettner, A Web resources Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde, IfL http://www.iflleipzig.com/institut.0.html?&L=1 33 http://www.uwsp.edu/geO/internet/world_regions.html http://members.aol.com/rhaberlin/cgmod.htm Figure 1. The cover of The Geographia Generalis by Berhard Varenius (1650). The division between general (systematic) and special (regional) geography was introduced in this book. (The Library of the University of Oulu, photo by Anssi Paasi) 34 Figure 2. Richard Hartshorne’s view on the relations between geography and systematic science. The figure was included in his The Nature of Geography.