ABSTRACT
Studies on region formation have strongly benefited from recent discussions on the constructivist and relational nature of regions and scale, and on ‘scalar politics’ against the backdrop of globalization (Brenner, 1999; Hamilton, 2002; Lagendijk, 2002; MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999; Swyngedouw, 1997). These accounts shed light on the proliferation of regional regimes as manifested across Europe, including city-regional regimes, cross-border regions, regional economic districts and clusters, rural development areas, various sub-national/sub-federal regional divisions, etc. (Herrschel and Newman, 2002; Keating, 1998; Le Galès and Lequesne, 1998; Lukassen, 1999). But the critical question remains how the rising significance of the region, in both an analytical and a normative sense, is itself predicated upon a wider set of cul-tural, political, economic, and policy practices. How did the region, with all its associated concepts, turn into such an apparently dominant or ‘omnipresent’ imaginary (MacLeod and Jones, 2007)?
