Regional Geographies 1: What’s in a region?

Abstract

Rather than attempting to find some sort of unitary definition of regions, here the aim is to consider how the term has been mobilised to open up geographical thinking about the spaces of social, economic and political life – moving beyond and building on relational and structural ways of thinking. The dominant contemporary approaches to regions and regionalism can be clustered along three main axes: the possibility of regional identity and the bordering of regional spaces; the practices of regional planning; and the generation of spatial inequality. In each case, the significance of combined and uneven development is fundamental.

Setting the scene

Back in the early 1990s, Nigel Thrift was already calling in the pages of this journal for a new regional geography (Thrift, 1990, 1991, 1993) – at that time, one that was rooted in post structuralist thinking. But by 2012, in his review of regions and place, Andy Jonas again noted that: ‘It seems that human geography is in the midst of a(nother) period in which received concepts of place, region, territory and scale are very much open to critical scrutiny…if not in need of a fundamental overhaul’ (Jonas, 2012: 263). Meanwhile in 2019, in his review of a comprehensive text that sought to bring debates around the geographies of regions and territories together (Paasi et al., 2018), Paul Benneworth complained of ‘an overarching sense of fragmentation, with the constituent elements of a geography of regions and territories drifting ever further apart. Whenever something interesting is identified, it is theorized in multiple, divergent ways, which serves to fracture the way that other researchers react to and study it, thus amplifying this fragmentation tendency’ (Benneworth, 2019: 419). And yet, as Martin Jones notes, ‘Regions have been central, and…remain hyper-critical to, the foundations of geography, and…the discipline of geography can be traced through the different ways in which “the region” has been interpreted and conceptualized’ (Jones, 2022: 43).

In that wider context, the questions that underpin the argument developed in what follows are: to what extent is it possible to identify a shared understanding of regions and regionalism from contemporary debates? And – maybe equally important – is it necessary to acknowledge that there can be no unitary understanding of regions and to reflect on the implications of drawing such a conclusion? John Harrison and others suggest that ‘In our fast-paced and volatile globalizing world, regions increasingly take on multiple forms such that asking “What is a region?” has never been so redundant’ (Harrison et al., 2021: 7–8).

The (productive) messiness of regional thinking

The term ‘region’ is ubiquitous – incorporated without reflection into the titles of a wide range of journals and used to frame a series of geographical debates. Even the authors who dismiss it so forcefully can be seen to use it to position many of their arguments in other settings (see, e.g. Harrison et al., 2023; Harrison and Gu, 2023). The range of regional constructions that flow through recent academic literature highlights some of the difficulties of identifying any single model while also confirming the power and attractiveness of drawing on some sort of shared regional understanding, each different version appealing to what seems to be a spatial common sense.

A region is often thought of as a sort of in between space – at its simplest positioned in a scalar hierarchy between local (or urban) and national, or maybe in the case of global regions, between national and global. Sometimes regions fit into governmental structures and, more often, they cut across them. There has been a continuing reference (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) to notions of regional identity which suggest that regions are more than lines on map imposed from above. At one time – in Europe at least – regions even seemed to offer the prospect of post-national structures in the form of a Europe of the regions. Meanwhile, recent regional constructions have pointed to the existence of functional economic regions, of city regions, of mega regions, of polycentric urban regions, as well as taken for granted or ordinary regions. One recurring motif involves a focus on enhancing regional competitiveness, yet regional thinking is also frequently mobilised to chart spatial inequalities and highlight the ways in which uneven development favours some at the expense of others.

Each of these formulations may enable debate and reflection about relationships between space, place, economy and politics, but they also highlight the difficulty of identifying some set of underlying principles or defining characteristics that make regions ‘regions’, generating the region as a spatial and scalar construct. Over the last two decades (even if it sometimes feels as if it has been longer), there has been a tension between approaches identified as ‘relational’ and those that might be positioned as rather more ‘structuralist’. The former have focused on the extent to which regions are made up or assembled often with the help of politically driven or planning inspired imaginaries, while the latter have been more concerned to identify the construction of territory rooted in economic geographies of structured coherence or functional economic spaces (this was already an issue on which Jonas focused in 2012). There continues to be a tension between those for whom regions are basically a spatial expression of underlying economic forces and those for whom the focus is on the process of making up – imagining – or assembling regions.

Over the years, however, that debate seems to have generated more heat than light. On both sides, there is a temptation to caricature those on the other side. Here, the aim is to build a more open way of thinking that works across the divide and brings together a range of approaches to highlight the active geographies of region making. While it may once have seemed heretical to say so, in other words, perhaps the answer is to suggest that it is necessary to think through both perspectives – both and, rather than either or.

In a related context, Jamie Peck calls for a ‘zig zag’ approach, enabling a dialogue between more structuralist and conjunctural ways of thinking in analysing processes of uneven development (Peck et al., 2023), while Martin Jones draws on theories of plasticity as a means of bringing them together (Jones, 2022). Meanwhile, Simin Davoudi and Elizabeth Brooks offer another means of thinking through the implications by suggesting that ‘in the politics of rescaling, imaginaries are performed to fix that which is fluid and unsettle that which is long conceived of as fixed’ (Davoudi and Brooks, 2021: 52), and David Wachsmuth and Patrick Kilfoil persuasively set out to bring what they call the two logics of regionalism – structured coherence and the spatial imaginary – together in their comprehensive analysis of a particular Canadian case (Wachsmuth and Kilfoil, 2021). From a different perspective, reflecting on the case of the Arctic, Vesa Väätänen stresses the need ‘to focus on the practices that enact a region as a territorial and relational space’ (Väätänen, 2026: 4).

The dominant contemporary discussions of regions and regionalism can be clustered around three main axes, and the discussion that follows is organised around them. The first is focused on regional identity and the bordering of regional spaces; a second emerges from the practices of regional planning, particularly with a focus on economic development and building economic competitiveness; while a third uses a regional frame to highlight forms of spatial inequality. In each case – although not always made explicit and in different ways – the underlying significance of uneven development is apparent, and the final section of the paper begins to explore the ways in which that notion effectively integrates relational and structural approaches.

Searching for regional identities

A strong version of regionalism may be defined through forms of popular territorial identity. Although rarely explicitly acknowledged in contemporary debates (Jones, 2022 is a notable exception), a focus on regions was a fundamental aspect of traditional geographical thinking, stretching back to the days of Vidal de la Blache and Elisee Reclus in the nineteenth century, with their focus on regional identities and inherent territorial understandings. In this context, regions were understood to be the product of the complex relationships between natural (even geological) phenomena and the people whose lives were framed by them. It was these relationships that generated the territorial identities that defined regions.

Perhaps the most subtle contemporary inheritor of the classic geographical tradition is Anssi Paasi, who builds on it without sinking into the determinist romanticism of his predecessors. For him bordering is the key to constructing regions as ‘assembled temporary permanencies’ (Paasi, 2022a). He develops a story of what he identifies as spatial socialisation rooted in ‘geohistorical practices and discourses in which individuals and collectives become socialized as “members” of bounded entities by negotiating and embracing “structures of expectations,” identities and ideologies, particularly by means of education and media’ (Paasi, 2022b: 11). In summarising his approach and reflecting back on a long period of work, he suggests that his intention ‘was to create conceptual frameworks for understanding regions, regional identities, forms of spatial socialization and borders as part of region-building’ (Paasi, 2024: 501).

In that context, Paasi makes an ‘Analytical distinction between the identity of a region and the regional identification of inhabitants’, in order to avoid simply assuming any necessary equation between the two – or any simple causal relationship in which the former necessarily leads to the latter (Paasi, 2024: 502). Regions have frequently been institutionalised and reinstitutionalised in practice as governmental territories (Gulbrandsen, 2023; Väätänen and Zimmerbauer, 2020) without those institutional changes necessarily reflecting shifting identities, even if they help to frame them. In a Chinese context, Pinyu Chen and others (2024) explore some of the ways in which popular regional identities are negotiated and renegotiated to the extent that what they call ‘phantom’ regions may survive even as formal regions are institutionally redefined through administrative restructuring.

Nevertheless, for Paasi, the possibility of regional identification by inhabitants remains a fundamental aspect of the regional challenge – bordering and territory have the potential to generate regional identity and historically over time have done so in ways that are reflected in his own case studies. Spatial socialisation implies the making of regional identities. Although in principle, at least, this remains a contingent process rather than a necessary one the expectation seems to be that regional identities exist and can be expected to be reproduced. In effect the role of geographers (historically at least) has been to explain this, rather than question it.

In his reflection on Paasi’s writings, Kees Terlouw reframes the question while retaining the explanatory framework. He argues that what he calls ‘the victory of the mobile world’ ensured that ‘Well-established regional identities, which were formed over the centuries, were challenged by the formation of new regions to bolster the global competitiveness of spatial economic clusters’ (Terlouw, 2024: 472). The emergence of metropolitan or city regions ‘undermined traditional thick regional identities’ replacing them with ‘thinner’ forms of regional identity. ‘Well-established regional identities, which were formed over the centuries, were challenged by the formation of new regions to bolster the global competitiveness of spatial economic clusters’ (Terlouw, 2024: 472). Terlouw identifies the existence of strong regional identities in ‘well-established’ regions and the ways in which those who live in them are concerned about the extent to which those identities are being eroded in the face of economic decline and social change. He contrasts these concerns with the ways in which local policy actors have sought to reframe their regions through a lens that stresses their economic potential in global markets, rather than building on or reflecting existing or past forms of identity.

Regions as policy objects

In recent years regions have been the focus of intense policy attention, to the extent that the planner may be understood to assume ‘the role of orchestrator and enabler of planning regional futures’ (Harrison et al., 2021: 15). At the core of this policy attention has been the notion that bringing different aspects of economic activity under state leadership has the potential to boost regional competitiveness (and prosperity). Meanwhile, other agencies (including universities) increasingly seek to position themselves as part of regional growth coalitions (see, e.g. Fumasolia and Kitagawa, 2025, Esposito et al., 2025, Johnston et al., 2023; Rossi et al., 2023).

The emphasis on competitiveness is perhaps particularly apparent in debates around city regions, summarised by Davoudi and Brooks in noting that the construction of a city-regional imaginary is ‘neatly aligned with the neoliberal obsession with city-led economic growth imperatives’ (Davoudi and Brooks, 2021: 55). For some, the importance of city regions as the driver of growth is seen to generate a requirement to plan differently and longer term, moving beyond fragmented forms of governance and focussing on potential urban and regional futures, developing spatial imaginaries that stretch beyond existing local authority boundaries (Dixon et al., 2023). But it is not restricted to that specific spatial formation – corridors, arcs, bays, valleys, clusters, crescents, superclusters, powerhouses and more all find an expression in the language of regional economic boosterism (see, e.g. among many others, Cochrane, 2020; Mackinnon, 2021; Meulbroek et al., 2023; Valler et al., 2023; Wachsmuth and Kilfoil, 2021).

The emergence of polycentric urban regions as a policy object and spatial construction is particularly noticeable in this context. They may initially have been associated with the planning policies of the European Union (Harrison et al., 2023) in the days when it was acceptable to look for ways of moving beyond national boundaries in developing policy initiatives, implicitly challenging one set of boundaries and suggesting the possibility of others as well as enabling an approach that focused on networking and linkages rather than competitive city regions in which success for one implied failure for the other (Keating, 2017, 2021). Meanwhile, the notion of polycentric urban regions has been taken up rather more enthusiastically in the context of a very different state form.

In China the state has been an active agent in developing a politics of city regional development, but the nature of the city region has often taken on a more extended form, including in the identification of what have been called ‘super mega city-regions’ (Zhang et al., 2023a: 12. See also Li et al., 2025) and the polycentric urban regions associated with them (Cheng and Shaw. 2021; Wang et al., 2020). In this context, John Harrison and others (2023) argue that ‘Polycentric urban regions (PURs) are an empirical reality, an analytical framework and a normative goal for territorial development policies’ (Harrison et al., 2023: 213). Chris Meulbroeck and others (2023) critically explore this phenomenon through the story of uneasy and sometimes uncertain regional development/region-making in the case of what has been called China’s Greater Bay Area. They present the Greater Bay Area initiative as ‘the latest and most ambitious attempt to “regionalise” the development process in the Pearl River Delta, promising to accelerate political-economic integration via an innovation-intensive model of growth’ (Meulbroek et al., 2023: 97) that ‘charges a multi-local growth coalition by way of a galvanising narrative of upward convergence’ (Meulbroek et al., 2023: 114).

The identification of a polycentric urban region offers a sharp counter to a narrow focus on fragmented spatial competitiveness because of the way in which it highlights the extent to which there may be a range of urban centres clustered within it whose development may be ‘mutually beneficial and balanced’ so that what is emphasised is the potential ‘synergy, cooperation and complementarity between the centres’ (Harrison et al., 2023: 215). And that is seen to override any assumed competition between them (see also Cheng and Shaw, 2021 and, from a slightly different perspective, Zhang et al., 2023b). In this context, debates around the region highlight the centrality of spatial thinking to economic development, but in ways that go beyond simple models of neoliberalism, as regional approaches inform the practices of what Fangzhu Zhang and others (Zhang et al., 2023a) refer to as state entrepreneurialism, managing in and beyond the market (see also Wu and Zhang, F., 2026).

Regional inequality

If one take on regions finds its main expression in a search for state strategies focused on infrastructure-led growth, another highlights forms of spatial inequality from a different angle, focussing not on growth but on the consequences of a pattern of growth that has favoured some places or regions alongside (and perhaps at the expense of) others. Stress is placed on the growth of entrenched regional inequality across the countries of North America and Western Europe over the last quarter of a century (Bathelt et al., 2024; Faggian et al., 2024). Stefania Fiorentino and others (2024) spell this out, identifying a ‘common trend …for a group of highly successful regions and cities, those in the top 10% or the top quartile of a country’s distribution, to pull strongly ahead of, and away from, those below the national average level of prosperity, and especially those in the bottom 10–25%’ (Fiorentino et al., 2024: 4).

They set out some of the different names given to the bottom regions in different countries, while stressing that they are cases of the same phenomenon: ‘the “left behind places” in the UK, “La France peripherique” (peripheral areas) in France, the “abgehängte Regionen” (suspended regions) in Germany, the “Aree Interne” (inner areas) in Italy, the “Kimpgebieden” (shrinking areas) in the Netherlands, the “La Espana vaciada” (the hollowed out) in Spain and the “legacy cities” and “rustbelt regions” in the USA’ (Fiorentino et al., 2024: 2). In recent writing focused on the UK, this has been translated into powerful texts that confirm the ways in which the economic divisions between London and the South-East of England, the other regions of England and the UK’s other nations have been maintained and reproduced (see, e.g. Daams et al., 2024; Martin and Sunley, 2023).

In both Europe and the US, however, it has also been noted that the patterns of growth and decline are more uncertain than any model that identifies a simple distinction between successful (or ‘superstar’) regions and those that have been ‘left behind’. In the European context, Andreas Diemer and others (2022) highlight the existence of what they call a ‘regional trap’, in which a series of middle-income regions remain disadvantaged in the face of the dramatic growth of a few successful regions. In the US, Tom Kemeny and Michael Storper (2024) develop a similar critique, highlighting what they call growing ‘spatial income inequalities’ in the US, almost entirely ‘driven by a modest number of superstar city-regions, whose influence on the system’s divergence comes both from significant growth in their average income levels as well as their considerable share of economy-wide population’ (Kemeny and Storper, 2024: 3). But they also stress that an overemphasis on this fundamental division may make it difficult to recognise other regional shifts. They argue that among the ordinary regions (those not identifiable as growth regions), there has been a process of income convergence. But this, too, has not been a simple linear process: convergence has meant some regions growing even as others have declined. ‘Some places are experiencing relative declines toward the mean, while others are rising up from initially low income levels. What convergence there is, therefore, signals a range of experiences: transformative catch-up for some regions, while for others a notable relative slippage’ (Kemeny and Storper, 2024: 3).

At a time in which ‘social and spatial inequalities have increased and become entrenched in many advanced economies’, Ron Martin has powerfully argued for an approach to regional studies that helps ‘to ensure that societies “build forward better” in a more progressive, socially, regionally and locally equitable, sustainable, and resilient way’ (Martin, 2021: 145). In the UK, these concerns fed into a series of debates around the possibility of ‘levelling up’ as a political strategy (Bailey et al., 2023; Martin et al., 2022; McCann, 2024; McCann and Ortega-Argilés, 2021) although more recently some have proclaimed a ‘requiem’ for that approach, at least as an active state policy (Tomaney et al., 2025). Diemer and others (2022) and Danny MacKinnon and others (2025) both question dominant state strategies, highlighting the extent to which they are focused on the symptoms rather than being targeted at the structural problems that underpin them. Emphasis is placed on the development of policies that foster competitiveness at the top end as a means of encouraging wider national economic growth, seeking to build on existing strengths, while similar measures are mobilised to encourage the development of ‘left behind’ places with little reflection on the relationship between the two poles or the extent to which the success of one is predicated on the weaknesses of the other.

From regions to uneven development and back again

In the context of his call for a more engaged regional studies, Martin positively recalls ‘The “critical regional studies” of the late 1970s and 1980s….[which] was explicitly concerned with capitalism as a process of combined and uneven social and regional development, how if left to its own devices capitalism simultaneously produces both economically successful and less successful places, and moreover argued that the production of the former depended in various ways on the exploitation of the latter. It was critical in the sense that it was concerned with revealing the social and spatial injustices of economic accumulation, and the formative logics, contexts and structures that underpin that process; and progressive in that it argued for major, radical reform of those formative logics, contexts and structures’ (Martin, 2021: 153).

Picking up on Martin’s framing, Peck (Peck et al., 2023) also directly refers back to these debates, highlighting the value of the ways in which David Harvey and Neil Smith ‘uncovered recurrent tendencies for uneven development in the laws of motion and crisis tendencies of capitalism’, and the ways in which Doreen Massey and Andrew Sayer ‘engaged conjunctural and contingent formations more concretely, as spaces of politics and as the synthesis of multiple determinations’ (Peck et al., 2023: 1397). For him it is the complementarity of the approaches working together – both relational and structural - that give them their power. Marion Werner directly connects these arguments with debates around regions: ‘Taking our cue from Smith and Massey’, she says, ‘we know that scales and regions are not pre-determined. The scalar remit of uneven development is part of the analytical challenge; so too is “the region.” We are forced to ask what territorial form uneven development takes, and how core and periphery relations are (re)produced, not only synchronically but also through time and the social relations that shape historical trajectories’ (Peck et al., 2023: 1399).

In this context, Fiorentino et al. (2024) similarly emphasise that the ‘problem of “left behind places” is…one of “combined and uneven geographical development.” Whether one adheres to an endogenous growth theoretic or a political–economy interpretation of this process, the outcome is much the same, namely that, once established, geographical inequalities in economic prosperity and growth are of themselves unlikely to be self-correcting, but rather self-perpetuating, path dependent, even cumulatively divergent, and difficult to reverse’ (Fiorentino et al., 2024: 13). In other words, their emphasis is on the combination – the ‘combined’ aspect of combined and uneven development – that reinforces inequality, positioning the regions in decline in a more or less permanent loop of failure.

From another perspective, however, it is also possible to imagine a more complex and uncertain process in which (whatever the current experience) some regions may find themselves repositioned as different opportunities for capitalist development present themselves. While the current model seems to promise a self-reinforcing process as the superstars move away from the rest, it is also possible that not all the superstars will remain superstars, even as some of the poorer regions become the target for investment. Spatial patterns of inequality are not fixed and combined and uneven development is a process that has the potential to generate unexpected outcomes (Peck, 2019). This reinforces the importance of maintaining critical analysis like that undertaken by Kemeny and Storper (2024) and Diemer and others (2022) to explore and understand the full complexity of the process.

A focus on combined and uneven development also has the potential to open up debates about regional inequality on a global scale that go beyond the focus on high-income capitalist countries and the special case of China, that so far seem to have dominated discussion. It is on those wider issues that the next in this series of papers will focus.