ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in ‘the region’ from a variety of both intellectual and practical perspectives, with the result that regional studies are once again of central concern. This re-emergence to centre stage has reflected a number of developments. On the one hand, from being consigned for many years to the murky margins of the history of geographical thought, somewhat surprisingly the region has come to occupy a central place in both social scientific discourse and political debates. At the same time as it has experienced a revived status in geography, the significance of the region — and, more generally of the spatial constitution of economies and societies — came to be recognized as a critical issue in much of the social sciences: for example, in the core disciplines of economics (Krugman, 2000), politics (Keating et al., 2003) and sociology (Urry, 1985) as well as in more applied areas of the social sciences such as business studies (for example, Porter, 2003; Snowdon and Stonehouse, 2006). Related to this, in the context of policy and practice, the region has become seen as a — even the — key territorial unit in an era of (neo)liberal globalization, the ‘imagined unit of competition’ (Lovering, 1999, p. 392), linked to a variety of measures to devolve responsibility for regional socioeconomic development and well-being to the regional level.
