ABSTRACT
For much of the twentieth century in Anglo-American Geography – and other social and natural sciences, for that matter – the region was a key analytical concept. Indeed, for some it was Geography’s central concept, the one which allowed the discipline to claim its privileged place as an integrative science or, even, as the “mother of sciences” (Hartshorne 1939: 373). However, arguments as to what, exactly, a region is and how regions should be delineated have coursed through the discipline during the past century or so. Thus, are regions “real” material things or instead structures imposed by the mind on the landscape? Are they given by Nature or constructed by humans? Are they coherent geo - graphical scales or do they simply serve as some kind of spatial average of the extremes of “the generality of aggregate social structure . . . and the uniqueness of locale” (Cooke 1985: 213)? Or are they merely
history (Baker 2003: 159; Wishart 2004)? These questions have been particularly nettlesome, for of all the scales with which geographers have concerned themselves, it is probably fair to say that the region has been the scale which has been most frequently conceptualized in spatially rather vague terms – although they have generally been viewed as geographical entities that sit somewhere between the urban and the national scales in a hierarchy of spatial resolutions, regions have been seen to vary considerably in geographical extent, from rooms in houses (Giddens 1984: 119) to continental-sized areas.
