ABSTRACT
The concept of regions has nearly always been of central importance to geography and other disciplines that study earth-referenced phenomena (Linton, 1951; Kostbade, 1968; Richardson, 1992; Martin and James, 1993). From the Classical period to the Modern and Postmodern, the identification, description, and explanation of regions has played a critical role in attempts to understand and control the earth and its phenomena. “Understanding the idea of region and the process of regionalization is fundamental to being geographically informed” (Geography Education Standards Project, 1994, p. 70). Although geographers’ relative emphases on idiographic description of unique places versus nomothetic explanation of abstract truths has varied greatly over time (and still varies greatly over university space), regionalization understood broadly has remained important. A travel log describing the cultures and climates of distant lands organizes the earth into regions; so too does a computational model of migration flows based on census data (see Hargrove and Hoffman, 1999, for evidence of the continued importance of regions to quantitative and scientific geography). Regionalization operates somewhat differently in regional and systematic (special and general) approaches to the study of geography, but regionalization is important either way. Even today, there is warrant to the traditional claim (Kimble, 1951) that geography is the “study of regions.”
