ABSTRACT
Any concrete investigation of human ecological situations is connected to regional contexts. Similar to human ecology at large, there is a traditional background to the study of regions on the one hand and a response-to-crisis aspect on the other. To consider the tradition first, the concern with regions and also boundaries between regions has, of course, been the explicit homeground of geographers for a long time. Until the middle of this century, the philosophy of geography had been one of treating regions as complexes of interrelated phenomena having, in a way, the status of individuals. Then this orientation came under attack by the ‘quantitative revolutionaries’ who declared the notions of individuality and (total) interrelatedness to be unscientific. Consequently, they established what has become known as ‘spatial analysis’, which amounted to a search for laws (or at least regularities) analytically describable by the fundamentals of location and movement in space (and time).1 The new geography had one thing in common with the old one, however: it restricted its view to phenomena of the biophysical (natural as well as human-made) environment. Consequently, the models of spatial analysis were largely devoid of any content in the psychological, social and also (human) ecological sense. Spatial analysis meanwhile has lost its status as the core of geography, but has managed to survive in joining forces with branches of economy, political science etc., to form what is known as ‘regional science’, an orientation which indulges in a kind of mathematical model Platonism.2 The development of a new kind of regional geography can be seen as the result of at least three factors.
