ABSTRACT
In Rethinking the Region (Allen et al., 1998), the authors of the current paper (and Doreen Massey) were at pains to stress that regions are ‘a series of open, discontinuous spaces constituted by the social relationships which stretch across them in a variety of ways’ (Allen et al., 1998, p. 5). They are formed out of a nexus of relations and connections, much of which takes its shape from elsewhere. In today's language, regions are a product of networked flows and relations fixed in a more or less provisional manner. The concern was to show the South East of England as a neo-liberal heartland, the product of overlapping social, political and economic relations, which stretched across space in ways that showed little or no respect for the regional boundaries imposed upon them. Massey has gone on to emphasize the importance of understanding ‘space as an open and ongoing production’ (Massey, 2005, p. 55), rather than trying to capture it as some fixed expression of territory. This relational approach is consistent with a number of other attempts to capture the uncertain ways in which regions are created and recreated through networked social relationships (for example, Amin, 2004; Paasi, 2001).
