The principal critique of the regional concept was that a region could be no more than the sum of its parts and therefore it could have no separate existence. The synergetics paradigm effectively eliminates the reductionism — holism debate. Were the region to be considered as a self-organizing complex system, the reductionist critique of the regional concept could be countered. Additionally, there are parallels between the application of the synergetics paradigm to geography and some developments in ‘nonpositivist’ geography. These developments could answer parts of the nonpositivist critique of ‘positivist’ geography and possibly bring the two schools of thought closer together.
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