ABSTRACT
Something rather curious has been happening in the discussion of ‘regions’. On the one hand, it is widely argued – by geographers and increasingly by economists – that, contrary to what might be expected in an era of accelerating globalization, regions have assumed heightened importance as the loci of economic growth, innovation and governance: we are witnessing a ‘resurgence of regions’ (see, for example, Kitson et al., 2005; Fujita et al., 1999; Porter, 1996, 2001, 2003; Regional Studies, 2003, 2004; Scott, 1998, 2001; Storper, 1997). Yet, at the same time, it is also argued that defining ‘regions’ – always a contentious issue – has become more difficult. Geographers have long grappled with the question of how to conceptualize and define ‘regions’. The very idea of a region conjures up an image of a distinct geographical area of the national territory that is at once both internally coherent in some way and different from other geographical areas (regions). Thus, Ann Markusen (1987: 16), a leading American economic geographer and regional planner, suggests that
[a] region is an historically evolved, contiguous territorial society that possesses . . . a socio-economic, political and cultural milieu, and a spatial structure distinct from other regions and from the other major territorial units, city and nation. This relational definition delineates regions through both (1) their mutual contrasts and distinctions and (2) their location on the scale of units.
