ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the resurgence of regions in academic discourse and political practice and suggests a need to consider two contested processes. The chapter draws a distinction between a state-driven and top-down functional regionalization and an often pre-existing and more bottom-up civil society regionalism. Academic debates have been suggesting for some time that regions are becoming central players in economic, social, political and cultural life. Research on 'social capital' has been important here for pointing out that networks of co-operation and trust can foster territorial awareness, civic identity and, in turn, can help to secure prosperity and instil democracy. These non-trivial empirics, however, can and should be connected to conceptual debates on politics and spatiality in geography and beyond. Regions can be seen as active products of reciprocal relationships between economic behaviour, the politics of representation and identity, state power geometries, and the sedimentation of these practices in time-space.
