Progress in Human Geography 26,6 (2002) pp.

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Place and region: regional worlds and words

Anssi Paasi
Department of Geography, Box 3000, 90014, University of Oulu, Finland

Introduction

Following the long descent of regional geography and some pleas that regions should be studied in theoretically informed ways (Gregory, 1978), new regional geography became an attractive category in the late 1980s. This label, proposed by Thrift (1983; cf. Johnston, 1985), became popular by virtue of the review by Gilbert (1988), who brought together various perspectives on the concept of region such as the Marxist and humanist approaches and theories of practice, but some others saw this simply as a project coming from the left (Sayer, 1989). New regional geography was and still is a somewhat ambivalent brand: while some authors evaluated by Gilbert noted the need to reconceptualize region/place, very few suggested any new regional geography as such. It has not become a coherent approach so far, but rather an umbrella term for research reflecting how regions/places can be constituted by and constitutive of social life, relations and identity (but see Thrift, 1994; 1998). Region and place continue to be significant categories in human geography, but increasingly in other fields, too (Auge, 1995; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Escobar, 2001 Keating, 2001), and their meanings are in flux. In spite of their importance, both are often taken as given or as subjugated to questions of economy, culture or identity, i.e., phenomena or processes occurring in given regions/places. Geographers have nevertheless theorized during the last two decades over such problems as how regions/places are produced and reproduced as part of the broader social production of space (Thrift, 1983; Pred, 1984; Paasi, 1991; Taylor, 1991; Entrikin, 1991; Murphy, 1991; Massey, 1995; Sack, 1997; Allen et al., 1998; MacLeod, 1998). I will look in this report at current views on region and place and at the relations between these categories, and finally try to contextualize the existing views and arguments.

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II

Region and research practice

When Smith (1996: 190) suggests that good concepts are flexible, ambiguous, suitable to any occasion, and fit for any eventuality, he shows how ambivalent region and place have remained in geography. In spite of the diffusion of influences across national boundaries, scholars operating in different language-bound, historically contingent regional worlds or spaces of knowledge (Livingstone, 1995; Gregory, 1998) use and develop concepts and approaches that only partly overlap. Existing conceptualizations thus reflect social including academic practices, contexts and constellations of power. One important structural factor is location among the humanities or the natural or social sciences. This may influence crucially how basic categories are shaped and what interpretations are found acceptable in society and in the academic world (Becher, 1989). The review by Gilbert (1988) made this clear with regard to the French and English-speaking worlds, but geographers in Germany (Werlen, 1997; Wollersheim et al., 1998; Bahrenberg and Kuhm, 1999), The Netherlands (Hoekveld and HoekveldMeijer, 1995; Terlouw, 2001) and Scandinavia (Paasi, 1991; Baerenholt, 1998; Hkli, 1998), for example, have also carried out theoretically informed research into region/place, often reflecting economic, cultural and political problems in their national contexts. Regional words thus always reflect the regional worlds in which they have been developed (cf. Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 168). (Key) Words and concepts are not the same thing. While the words region or place have proved to be lasting names for geographical concepts, the concepts themselves have been less permanent representations of categories of things or ideas. The transforming of social and disciplinary practices is a perpetual challenge to existing conceptualizations. The development of concepts should be based on abstractions that define these concepts in relation to the practices, discourses and power relations through which certain regions or places and the ideas of them have become what they are. Although state governance is still the major context for region (and identity) building, a re-scaling is currently taking place. It is to an increasing extent the international markets and regional political responses to global capitalism (such as the continental regime in Europe) that generate regionalism and accentuate the importance of regions (Keating, 1998; 2001). This implies a new politico-economic direction in the understanding of region and place in a world where the established state-based scalar logic is eroding and a more flexible understanding of current spatialities is needed (Amin, 2002). Regional worlds are also affected by new conceptualizations and discourses, since these are tools for both producing and interpreting social transformations (Foucault, 1970). Studies of spaces of regionalism show that regions continue to be significant elements in political mobilization, and that identity/ideology building often occurs in relation to other regional spaces (Keating, 2001; Giordano, 2000; Agnew, 2001; Jones, 2001, Jones and MacLeod, 2001). Spatial categories are hence an important part of ongoing social reproduction, political economy, identity and citizenship building on all spatial scales.

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III

Regional geographies in the making

In her review of methodological approaches to regions, Gilbert (1988) expanded the static typologies of regions, such as the distinctions between formal, functional, perceptual and administrative regions. As a further step, an analytical distinction can be made between three ideas of region that geographers perpetually lean back on: the pre-scientific, discipline-centred and critical ideas (Paasi, 1996a). The pre-scientific view implies that region is a practical choice, a given spatial unit (statistical area, municipality or locality), which is needed for collecting/representing data but which has no particular conceptual role. This view is typical of applied and comparative research (Tomaney and Ward, 2001). The current Europe of regions provides a particularly tempting grid of regions (and data) that are often taken for granted. While comparative studies are often based on given (statistical) areas, these units should not be regarded as neutral backgrounds, since regions are implicated in the social processes under scrutiny. The discipline-centred view of regions regards them as objects (e.g., traditional Landschaft geography) or results of the research process, often formal or functional classifications of empirical elements. These views are often used to legitimate a specific geographical perspective hence the debates as to whether regions are real units or imagined, mental categories (Minshull, 1967; Agnew, 2001). These debates are not only a historical curiosity but are fitting illustrations of the struggle over legitimate conceptualizations. The resulting regions are examples of academic socialization and power/knowledge relations, but they also show the power of geography, in that once they have been invented they can be powerful in shaping the spatial imagination and spatial action, e.g., in governance. School and university geography textbooks, for their part, still often represent naturalized narratives of a homology between bounded spaces and national/cultural groups. One perpetual challenge is to deconstruct the geographical assumptions and inclusions/exclusions that these narratives imply on all spatial scales (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Bell, 2001). Critical approaches emerge from social practice, relations and discourse, and strive to conceptualize spatialities as part of a wider network of cultural, political and economic processes and of divisions of labour. Most work labelled as new regional geography belongs here, including that which involves mapping individual/social identities (Thrift, 1998) or regarding regions as manifestations of capital accumulation (Massey, 1978) or settings for interaction (Thrift, 1983). While these approaches have normally been pursued separately, a critical regional geography should ideally combine the politico-economic approaches with questions of subjectification and identity formation (Paasi, 1996b). Further, the view of regions as processes stresses both the importance of a historical perspective for understanding them as part of a broader process of regional transformation and the conceptualization of the scales of history in each case (Paasi, 1991; Taylor, 1991). Critical approaches suggest that regions are social constructs (Entrikin, 1996; Allen et al., 1998; Agnew, 2001). While critical research may also take regions as given (Murphy, 1991), geographers use the social construction of regions in most cases to refer to historically contingent practices and discourses in which actors produce and give meaning to more or less bounded material and symbolic worlds not only to the cooperation of individual minds to create intersubjective meanings. Most social

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collectives, such as nations, are identified as imagined communities where spatial boundaries may be important constituents (Anderson, 1991), but, besides imagination, these collectives exist firmly in social practice. Similarly, regions are based at times on collective social classifications/identifications, but more often on multiple practices in which the hegemonic narratives of a specific regional entity and identity are produced, become institutionalized and are then reproduced (and challenged) by social actors within a broader spatial division of labour. 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. The institutionalization of regions may take place on all spatial scales, not only between the local level and the state (Paasi, 1991). Actors and organizations involved in the territorialization of space may act both inside and outside regions. All this means that geographers have been forced to rethink the question of the objectivity of regions and to understand them as processes that are performed, limited, symbolized and institutionalized through numerous practices and discourses that are not inevitably bound to a specific scale. Regions are thus complicated institutional structures, institutional facts, because they are dependent on human agreement and institutions (Searle, 1995), such as the media, the education system, political organization, governance and economics most of them operating across scales. Region building 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, since they can generate (and are generated by) action as long as people believe in them, and as long as they have a role in publicity spaces or in governance. This action may be simultaneously reproductive, resistant or transformative. Regions are complicated ideological and material media of power for individuals and social groups that researchers can conceptualize from different angles. The discourses on regions and regionalization, in which power-holding actors invest their interests and presuppositions in things and words, may actually gradually create the reality that they are describing or suggesting. A fitting example is the EU, where new governmental practices have increased radically the number of region/identity builders actors who operate with regions, and who write, talk and draw public representations to market them (Paasi, 2002). Practical classifications statements of what regionalizations and regions are are orientated towards the production of social effects and impregnated with power (Bourdieu, 1991). Thus these new spaces of action and publicity may finally affect the distribution of resources and the life of the people in the regions. IV Region and place in a globalizing world

Most regional categories are laden with historical connotations that do not normally change rapidly although they may be constantly challenged. The major current challenges are the transformations occurring in economics, governance and politics, in fact harking back to the earliest English uses of the word region: to rule. These economic and administrative connotations are evident, e.g., in the debates on

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globalization, changing forms of communication or the rise of the Europe of regions. Interdisciplinary research in this context has been carried out into new regionalism, new forms of regulation, de-/reterritorialization, re-scaling of (state) governance and sovereignty, and into regional identity (Keating, 2001; Le Gals and Lequesne, 1998; Calleya, 2000; Pierre, 2000; Krasner, 2001; MacLeod, 1998; MacLeod and Jones, 2002; Paasi, 2001; Tomaney and Ward, 2001; Jones, 2001). Particularly useful reviews of the spatiality of current political economic tendencies are MacLeod (2001) and Amin (2002). Thrift (1998) aptly recalls that, however different the accounts of globalization may be, the notion of region is central to each of them. In spite of this new interest in regions (and places), many researchers have tended to conceptualize phenomena and processes occurring in and between regions rather than theorizing over regions as parts of these processes. Another problem is that the region has been understood as a given scale between the state and the local (Scott, 1998), a view that is currently changing as attention is coming to be paid to the multiple processes and scales of social reproduction (Swyngedouw, 1997; Brenner, 1998; 2001; Dicken and Malmberg, 2001; Marston, 2000; Marston and Smith, 2001; Amin, 2002). It is partly due to the association of region with governance/territoriality and the naturalized view of regional as a level between local and national that the notion of place is increasingly being preferred today. It is perhaps symptomatic that the word region is not included in the indices of such important books as Douglas et al. (1996), Harvey (1996), Massey et al. (1999), Adams et al. (2001), Sack (1997), Scott (1998) or Storper (1997). Even though geographers often understand place and region as synonymous (Pred, 1984; Johnston, 1991; Allen et al., 1998) or use a scale based on such categories (local/supra-local) (Entrikin, 1989; 1991) or the relation of these categories to spatial experience (May, 1970; Tuan, 1975) as arguments to distinguish them from each other, the current interest in place implies the old etymological meaning of place as a broad way or open space, not a return to the particular, unique or generic qualities of place. Place is one of the most multilayered and multipurpose key words in current geographical language (Harvey, 1996: 208). Hence place is conceptualized flexibly, ad hoc, without any presuppositions of scale, showing a relativist tendency to leave the general meanings of categories open. Place is thus understood contextually (and at times metaphorically) in relation to ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, body, self, etc., often in such a manner that it becomes one constitutive element in the politics of identity (Massey et al., 1999). While location and the local scale have been part of the traditional geographical understanding of place, humanistic geographers did not fix place to any scale but defined it in relation to (localized) human (intersubjective) experience (Tuan, 1975). Current views are becoming increasingly more open and reflect the cultural, moral and economic dimensions prevailing in local-global relations (Relph, 1996; Sack, 1997; Adams et al., 2001; Escobar, 2001). Entrikin (1999) argues that the moral significance of place becomes evident when places are conceived of not as locations in space but as being related to individual subjects, as processes mediating between the particular and the universal. Critical human geographers similarly do not fix place to any scale but argue for more open horizons: if space is thought of as a set of social relations that are stretched out, then places are locations of particular sets of intersecting social relations (Massey, 1995;

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Massey et al., 1999) and governance/planning (Madanipour et al., 2001). Allen et al. (1998) also understand region in this way, using the prosperous southeast of England as an example. Thrift (1998) takes the same example in his account of the new regional geography, but asks whether such multinodal sets of successful agglomerations are planar regions at all (cf. Tomaney and Ward; 2001, and Jones and MacLeod; 2001, on the northeast region, where economic decline has created cohesion). The topographical view of Amin (2002) on globalization and its rejection of oppositions such as place/space, proximity/distance and scaling/re-scaling might be helpful in clarifying current conceptualizations. Traditional ideas of region/place as bounded spaces have thus been challenged and not only in new regional geography. Criticism of the account of the world as a mosaic of separate cultures (Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Olwig and Hastrup, 1997) has been endorsed by cultural (Jackson and Penrose, 1993; Sibley, 1995) and political geographers (Agnew, 1994; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996) and by IR scholars (Shapiro, 1999). These interdisciplinary views force us to reflect on boundaries in new ways. While both the ultra-liberal rhetoric of the borderless world (Ohmae, 1995) and the view on the links between identity and boundaries (Conversi, 1995; Pratt, 1999) have gained support on a general level, the question of whether a place/region/territory should be understood as a bounded unit is of course more complicated. As in the case of state territoriality (Taylor, 1994), the various organizations, institutions and actors involved in the institutionalization of a region may have different strategies with regard to the meaning and functions of the region and its identity (cf. Allen et al., 1998: 34). Regions may be open to economic or cultural processes and concomitantly territorially governed. Some people may identify themselves passionately with the region, others may have a less affective attitude, while some may raise strong resistance to hegemonic spatialized identity narratives and practices. Thus a region/place may be bounded in some sense but not in others. The idea of a boundary as a dividing line is just one possible conceptualization that has guided (political) geographical thinking since the institutionalization of the field. Boundaries cannot be written off, but new interpretations of their meanings in social life can be developed. Boundaries occur not only at the edges of regions, but are to be found everywhere within them, in innumerable practices and discourses that have to be conceptualized and analysed to make visible the strategies of power that are sedimented in collective identity narratives. Boundaries are a terrain of mixing and blurring, where material, symbolic and power relations become fused (Paasi, 2003). New horizons have thus challenged the uniqueness of place, emphasizing openness and a multiscalar character but often ignoring human experience (but see Agnew, 1987; Taylor, 1999). An analytic distinction between place and region renders possible one interpretation of the multidimensionality of spatiality which is usually lost in new regional geographies that take the two terms as synonymous. If regions are conceptualized as multiscalar institutional structures, places can be conceptualized as cumulative archives of personal spatial experience emerging from unique webs of situated life episodes. Place is thus not bound to any specific location but conceptualized from the perspective of personal and family/household histories and life stories. There is no necessary link between people and a specific location. People increasingly change their positions and cross borders as (im)migrants, guest workers, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists and users of media. Different materialized and metaphorical

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locations become embodied and accumulate in their moving bodies and experience (cf. Thrift, 1999). Individual life histories and meanings are always social, since they are positioned in practices and discourses based on family, class, gender, ethnicity, generations and, more broadly, social history. None of these elements is bound only to a specific location or region. Region and place become fused in inevitably contested institutional practices, discourse and memory. This conceptualization of place renders it possible to locate experience and meaning in increasingly dynamic regional worlds. One example of this is provided by Fullilove (1999; also, 1996), who reflects the importance of place by drawing on both her life geography as a member of a multiethnic family and various documents. These thoughts resemble the ideas of Thrift (1998) on the new New regional geography, a specific theoretical, methodological and political stance that stresses interconnectedness, hybridity and possibility. This non-representational approach opens up three important research questions (p. 44): how the structures of power dominating everyday lives are built up from a range of materials, how subjectivity is built up performatively and productively as a part of these structures, and how space intervenes and is constituted. Accordingly, Thrift wants to shift attention from discursive and contemplative models of human action to practices and tactile issues such as affects, passions and dreaming. V Conclusions

Regional worlds are increasingly complex and their origins and meanings are hidden in numerous social practices and discourses that fuse various spatial scales. Similarly, current views of region and place are contested and are characterized by discontinuities and asymmetries. These developments have challenged the existing disciplinary boundaries and those between regional, cultural, economic and political geography. This is indeed a fascinating moment for geographers to reflect contextually on how social relations, institutional structures, ideologies, symbols and subjectivity/identity come together in discourses and practices through which both regions/places and narratives on them come into being, exist and disappear. It remains to be seen whether this complex field will provide geographers with conceptual and methodological tools for developing a more coherent agenda for a new regional geography. Or will it still be the case, as noted a decade ago by Johnston (1991: 67), that we do not need regional geography but we do need regions in geography. In both cases, region and place will still be major conceptual elements in the field. References
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