ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a model of areal differentiation. It is based on space-organizing forces and reflects the intricate relationships on various levels of analysis between spatial, thematic, and regional geographical classes and their attributes. The variants which can be deduced from the model can be used to classify geographical regions. Therefore, regional geographers do not need to bother about the general or scientific quality of their products. General knowledge is about classes of phenomena. Each geographical region is a class in itself. The difference between regional geography and other geographical subdisciplines is also a methodological question. Both geographical and thematic regions can be studied as classes which are distributed in a larger region. Regional geography is about a complex of forces that binds natural, political, urban, and other thematic regions into more or less coherent regional units, or geographical regions, and those forces that unbind geographical regions into their constituent parts.
