Regional Geographies 1: What’s in a region?

Rather than attempting to find some sort of unitary definition of regions, here the aim is to consider how the term has been mobilised to open up geographical thinking about the spaces of social, economic and political life – moving beyond and building on relational and structural ways of thinking. The dominant contemporary approaches to regions and regionalism can be clustered along three main axes: the possibility of regional identity and the bordering of regional spaces; the practices of regional planning; and the generation of spatial inequality. In each case, the significance of combined and uneven development is fundamental.