ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to consider, in a preliminary fashion, the links between regional uniqueness, regional change, and social change and the ways in which human geographers and other social scientists have analysed them. For many years, one of the main concerns of human geography — indeed arguably its dominant pre-occupation — was the study of regions. Some geographers even went so far as to claim that there was a regional method which defined the discipline as a distinctive area of intellectual inquiry. The main focus of such studies was upon describing the unique characteristics of regions, a perfectly respectable though intellectually limited objective. In so far as there was any attempt to explain these, it turned inwards and drew upon the internal characteristics of the regions, the existence of which the analysis presupposed. Moreover, and this is especially clear in the work of De la Blache and his followers, there was a suggestion that regions reflected the emergence of an equilibrium between people and nature in a particular location that was, in the final analysis, unique to each region. A region’s uniqueness might alter, slowly, over time but only as a result of the changing relation ships between people and nature within it. There was little attempt to relate the internal characteristics of regions to wider social processes, to relate regional patterns to social processes, or to relate regional change to social change.
