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Region and place : Regionalism in question
Andrew E.G. Jonas
Prog Hum Geogr 2012 36: 263 originally published online 14 February 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0309132510394118
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Progress in Human Geography
36(2) 263–272
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Region and place:
Regionalism in question
Andrew E.G. Jonas
University of Hull, UK
Abstract
Territorial notions of place and region are being challenged by the relational viewpoint. Yet relational thinking
often neglects to address questions of territory and territorial politics. This progress report examines some
commonalities and differences between relational and territorial approaches to regions and regionalism.
It considers the treatment of the state and territorial politics in the various literatures developing around
the New Regionalism. The received distinction drawn between territorial and relational approaches could
be rendered obsolete if critical attention were to be paid to matters of territory and territorial politics.
Keywords
place, regionalism, regions, relational thinking, territorial politics
I Introduction
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 (Jessop et al., 2008;
Jones, 2009; MacLeod and Jones, 2007), if not
in need of a fundamental overhaul (Marston
et al., 2005). Specifically, those notions of place
and region that refer to bounded spatial units –
the so-called territorial viewpoint – are being
challenged, and in some instances usurped, by
concepts which draw attention to interspatial
relations, flows and networks – the so-called
relational viewpoint. The growing attraction of
the relational approach to regions reflects
certain misgivings about the representation of
territory in the literature developing around the
New Regionalism (Harrison, 2008a); misgivings
which are somehow neatly dispelled by contrasting relational spatial thinking to the territorial
viewpoint.
One theme which is central to relational
thinking is the idea that the region represents a
contingent ‘coming togetherness’ or assemblage
of proximate and distant social, economic and
political relationships, the scale and scope of
which do not necessarily converge neatly around
territories and jurisdictions formally administered or governed by the nation state (Allen and
Cochrane, 2007). At least, in this respect, proponents of the relational turn are arguably justified
in wanting to distance themselves from
bounded, static and ahistorical representations
of space and place. Such representations were
once closely associated with positivism and traditional regional geography and accordingly
have been the subject of extensive critical
Corresponding author:
Department of Geography, University of Hull, Hull HU6
7RX, UK
Email: [email protected]
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Progress in Human Geography 36(2)
analysis over the years. There is no need to
rehearse these critiques here. Suffice it to say
that references to the differences between territorial and relational viewpoints help to convey
the idea that regions are not self-contained formal territorial entities. Many critical regional
theorists now prefer to think of regions as fluid
and historically contingent social constructions
(Jones and MacLeod, 2004; Paasi, 2003, 2009).
Nevertheless, one might want to question the
wisdom of tarring all New Regionalists with the
same brush of thinking territorially rather than
relationally. Such characterizations tend to
deflect attention from some of the limitations
of relational thinking about regions (as well as
space, scale and territory more generally).
Not the least of these limitations is a propensity
to neglect the analysis of territorial politics.
For what seems to be missing in the relational/
territorial debate about regions is any serious
discussion of territory and territoriality. In other
words, how might relational approaches to place
and region shed light on the state and territorial
politics? The purpose of this review is examine
whether recent debates about regional economic
development, interplace competition and regional
resilience are premised on certain (overlooked)
assumptions about the nature of territory and territorial politics. I begin with some brief reflections
on the commonalities and differences between
relational and territorial approaches to regions and
regionalism. This is followed by a discussion of
the treatment of the state and territorial politics
in the various literatures developing around the
New Regionalism. In conclusion, I suggest that
the received distinction drawn between territorial and relational approaches could be rendered
obsolete if closer attention is paid to questions
of territory and territorial politics.
II Territorial and relational
approaches reconsidered
In the past, human geographers have often
approached the region from divergent ontological
and epistemological perspectives (see Agnew
et al., 1996: 366–377). For example, there was the
long-standing debate about the merits of studying, respectively, formal and functional regions.
That debate served to highlight some of the key
philosophical and epistemological differences
between traditional regional geography and its
successor positivist spatial science (see Johnston
and Sidaway, 2004: 61–110). Recent and ongoing
encounters between realist (so-called politicaleconomy) geographers and poststructuralists
continue this tradition of debate and discussion,
at times even promising to put aside once and
for all the age-old distinction between formal
and functional regions (Agnew, 1990). In conveying the sense that the territorial and relational
approaches represent two opposing extremes
along a spectrum of approaches to place and
region, differences in ontology and epistemology
can be clarified; as also can certain claims that
can be made about the usefulness of associated
concepts like scale, territory and network
(Jessop et al., 2008).
The deployment of heuristic frameworks and
opposing concepts to highlight differences of
theoretical approach – or what might be called
binary thinking (see Harvey, 1999) – can be helpful in the further refinement of critical concepts.
Presumably without such debate and discussion,
the discipline would be in a philosophical and
methodological stasis. Yet it is worth noting that
the relational perspective on place and region is
not new; nor does it represent an internally
consistent set of approaches. In fact, several
distinctive strands of relational thinking about
regions have emerged from the work of radical
human geographers and social theorists in the
1970s and early 1980s (Jonas, 1988; Pudup,
1988; Sayer, 1989). For example, proponents
of what became known as the New Regional
Geography (NRG) argued that places and
regions could be theorized as a combination, and
contingent outcome, of the interaction of localized social relations and material conditions
with wider processes of capitalist restructuring
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265
(Massey, 1979). When examined through the
lens of the realist method, the NRG envisioned
places and regions as neither fixed territories
nor a contingent ‘coming together’ of global
flows and networks (which would imply that
places and regions had little or no independent
causal influence). Rather regions were to be
examined as semi-coherent territories within
which place-specific causal properties could
shape – and in turn were shaped by – the wider
dynamics of capital accumulation, state intervention (or withdrawal) and uneven development.
This way of thinking about regions might now
be offered as evidence of what Jones (2009) has
recently described as ‘phase space’. This is the
idea that space (i.e. regionalism) is only ever
semi-coherent in its concrete realization; it is
always constructed out of the tensions between
spatial fixity and flow. Therefore the key issue is
to think not so much of the processes that help to
containerize space into discrete regions but rather
to investigate where, why and how processes of
regionalization are negotiated, constructed and
contested, becoming semi-permanently fixed or,
conversely, dissolving altogether.
Relational perspectives on place and region
have often been characterized as exhibiting a
global sense of place (Massey, 1991). What this
means is that one can write about the ‘globalness’
of regions without assuming that the regional
scale is fixed in space, subordinate to the global
or somehow exists ‘above’ the local. In this
respect, regions cannot – and indeed should not
– be disconnected analytically from other regions,
scales and territories. Above all else, relational
thinking about regions gives licence for critical
geographers to conceive of development processes and territorial politics in capitalism as operating both in a ‘vertical’ or ‘upwards’ dimension
(e.g. from local-to-regional-to-national-to-global
scales) and also ‘horizontally’ (place-to-place
relations, including global connections, and differences). Of course, it has since become fashionable to distance the study of place, region and
spatial politics from so-called ‘vertical’ thinking
about territory and territorial organization
(Marston et al., 2005). Quite why this should
have happened is difficult to pinpoint. Much
of it has to do with the premise of the ‘scale
debate’ in which so-called vertical thinking
(about scalar hierarchies) has confusingly been
equated with the territorial approach to place,
region and spatial politics (Jonas, 2006). Protagonists in the scale debate often like to attribute
vertical thinking to political-economic theories
of the region when in fact it could be argued that
such theories underpinned relational thinking
about place and region in the first instance.
Morgan (2007) has argued that such an overly
simplistic reading of the relational perspective
(i.e. that it is not only different to, but also a
distinct improvement upon, territorial approaches)
leads to two false assumptions:
In the first place it is a caricature of the mainstream
view of cities and regions; by juxtaposing relational
and territorial readings of place, as though they are
mutually exclusive, it creates a binary division that
is wholly unwarranted. Second, like its modernist
forebears, it leaves the impression that territorial
political affinities are antediluvian, parochial or
even reactionary. (Morgan, 2007: 1248)
There is also a sense in which the tone of recent
debates about whether regions are either territorial or relational recalls a bygone age when
regional geography was at the service of the
Enlightenment project. Then the main task of the
geographer was to draw boundaries around
those territories of interest to colonialist and
imperialist ventures. Echoing these sentiments,
Painter (2008) suggests that the ‘cartographic
anxiety’ continues to haunt contemporary critical approaches to the region, thereby resulting
in a lack of attention to how regionalism might
shed further light on territory and territoriality,
including state practices with respect to suchlike.
Although questions of territory, identity and
territorial politics should be at the forefront of
regional analyses (Paasi, 2009), one struggles
to find good examples in the regional economic
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development literature. The lack of attention to
territorial politics is surprising given that the
development of critical (relational) regional
thinking was once informed by historicalgeographical materialism (HGM), wherein concepts of territory, geopolitics and power were
quite central to regional analysis. HGM saw
regions and territorial organization operating at
the nexus of tensions between fixity and flow
in capitalism. Thus questions of regionalism,
territorial organization, power and politics were
very much at the forefront of David Harvey’s
early work on the geopolitics of capitalism
(Harvey, 1985). Harvey has revisited such concerns more recently in an analysis of the current
global accumulation crisis of capitalism. He has
argued that one outcome of the current crisis
could be an intensification of regionalization process as countries like the USA withdraw from global financial arena and look to build new regional
and transterritorial alliances (Harvey, 2009).
Harrison (2008a) is encouraged by the revival
of interest in regions among political-economic
geographers. Moreover, he suggests that the territorial and relational approaches to region and
place have more in common than their respective protagonists might care to admit (see also
Allen and Cochrane, 2007; Pike, 2007). Nevertheless, the relational and territorial approaches
do seem to diverge on the key issue of whether
regionalism is best viewed as a ‘bottom-up’ or
‘top-down’ process. The answer to this question
more often seems to depend on one’s positioning
in ontological debates than is the result of a considered examination of the concrete actions and
strategies of various agents, actors, interests and
the respective spaces of dependence and spaces
of engagement (Cox, 1998). As Morgan (2007:
1248) suggests, it is a contingent matter as to
whether regionalism is progressive (i.e. ‘bottomup’) or reactionary (‘top-down’). Therefore any
attempt to assign regionalism a priori either to the
territorial or to the relational perspectives does
not come across as an especially critical or
discriminating perspective on territorial politics,
economic and political interests, and spatial
outcomes.
III Competitive regionalism and
territorial politics
A cursory examination of regional development
literatures would reveal that questions of state
territoriality and territorial politics have generally been secondary to discourses of globalization, competition and economic development.
One finds plenty of assertions to the effect that
regions (and city-regions) are becoming more
competitive, efficient or resilient (see below)
than the nation state. Yet such assertions are
often made in the absence of any critical discussion of the role of the state and territorial politics.
This is not to say that some of the more astute
interpretations of the rise of the New Regionalism have completely failed to consider the nature
of post-Fordist territorial politics (Lovering,
1999; MacLeod, 2001; Scott, 1998; Storper,
1997). Yet the advance of the New Regionalism
literature is constantly bedevilled by sweeping
assertions to the effect that regions, metropolitan
regions and mega-regional agglomerations
operate as quasi-independent ‘actor spaces’ and
drive forward competition, economic growth and
wealth distribution. Moreover, this only ever
seems to happen at the expense of the nation state
and its extant internal territorial politics.
For instance, in his recent book, Who’s Your
City?, Richard Florida (2008) argues that:
As the distribution of economic activity has gone
global, the city-system has also gone global – meaning that cities now compete on a global terrain. That
means that bigger and more competitive economic
units – mega-regions – have superceded cities as
the real engines of the global economy. (Florida,
2008: 42)
Florida proceeds to list examples of such
mega-regions, including Greater Tokyo, BostonWashington, Rome-Milan-Turin, and so forth.
The latter example is worth a closer look.
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267
It describes a region stretching from the Italian
Alps to the ‘boot’ of southern Italy in one continuous urban sprawl (as measured in this case
by satellite images of the light emitted at night
from continuous city-regional developments).
In bestowing from aloft territorial coherence
on this unlikely Italian mega-region, Florida
neatly skirts over some complex historical,
cultural and political processes that might
(but in fact probably do not) bind this putative
region into a coherent geo-economic unit.
Florida’s analysis is fairly typical of a style of
pseudo-territorial analysis that has come to
characterize contemporary regional development theory. It begs all sorts of questions about
the role of actors and agents, territorial interests,
and associated problems of territorial dependence, which give the territorial-distributional
politics of global capitalist development pathways a mega-regionalist form.
Leaving aside for now the geopolitics of
mega-city-regions, New Regionalist thinking
has made quite substantial inroads into contemporary economic development discourse at all
scales. The notion of competitive regionalism,
in particular, has gained ascendancy in mainstream global policy thinking in spite of evidence
that regionalism continues to assume nationally
specific forms (Jonas and Ward, 2002). The corresponding attention given to territorial politics
and state territorial structures is often deemed to
be of secondary importance to the analysis of
putative new regionalist governance structures
(Ward and Jonas, 2004). This is not to say that the
territorial-distributional implications of the New
Regionalism have been ignored altogether. The
New Regionalism embraces diverse schools of
thought ranging from neo-regionalist thinking
in international relations (Ohmae, 1993) and
trade policy (Mucchielli et al., 1998) to the
workings of city-regional policy and public administration at the subnational scale (Mitchell-Weaver
et al., 2000; Pastor et al., 2000; Rusk, 1993). On the
one hand, anthropologists believe that questions
of territory, scale and efficiency are central to
discussions of the optimal size of the regional
state (Bodley, 2003). Regional scientists and geographers, on the other, suggest that in complex
modern state systems the reallocation of authority
across different scales creates distributional
asymmetries and inefficiencies (Rodrı́guez-Pose
and Gill, 2004). In short, there is no lack of attention to the economic and fiscal policy implications of regionalization for different scales of
state territoriality.
The growing divergence between mainstream
policy work on regional economic development
and critical approaches to regionalism represents
a point of departure for a recent special issue of
Regional Studies, which is devoted to conceptualizing local and regional development
(LRED) in the USA (Wood and Valler, 2010).
Several of the papers in this collection point to
the uniqueness and specificities of the regionalism question in the USA (Cox, 2010; Jonas et al.,
2010; Niedt and Weir, 2010). In an insightful
summary of the collection’s main findings,
Christopherson (2010: 230) gets to the heart of
the matter by asking ‘why is it that some types
of questions are visible and compelling in the
United States while others are missing from the
theoretical agenda?’ The answer she believes
lies in the nature of territorial-distributional
politics in the USA; the fragmentation of
government and governance means that ‘[c]ompetition among places is so embedded in the US
national governance regime and psyche that it is
assumed in LRED analysis’ (p. 230). Further
comparative work of this nature could shed
light on the extent to which certain widely held
beliefs about contemporary forms of regional
economic development and territorial competition are based on unexamined assumptions
about the state, territory and territorial politics.
IV Territorializing the economy:
The question of regional resilience
One senses a growing unease among some
regional development scholars regarding
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assertions that processes of deterritorialization
are taking hold to such an extent that regional
development theory can be so easily divorced
from knowledge of territory and territorial
politics. One symptom of this uneasiness is the
recent interest in the economic resilience of
regions. The metaphor of regional resilience has
acquired a certain intellectual currency in part
because of its ability to link regional economic
development to problems of social equity and
environmentalism. More pertinently, resilience
analysis opens up a different way of thinking
about the ways in which regional economic
development processes are – or could be – seen
as territorialized.
Notably, in these times of economic and
environmental crisis, the metaphor of resilience
resonates with the notion that economic development involves resistance and adaptation as
much as growth and competition. Resilience
implies that knowledge of the internal capacities
of regions matters as much as their external
relations. The gist of this idea can be summarized
as follows:
the fashionable use of the concept [of regional resilience] may originate both from an increased sense
of risk (economic and political as well as environmental) and from the perception that processes
associated with globalization have made places and
regions more permeable to the effects of what were
once thought to be external processes. (Christopherson
et al., 2010: 3)
Defined in this way, resiliency is an internal
property of (regional) territory, which must
always be juxtaposed to the external risks to places
and regions posed by global flows of investment
and environmental and economic crises.
Notwithstanding such considerations, Bristow
(2010) suggests that regional policy-makers continue to conflate resilience with competitiveness.
Like its predecessor concept of competitive
regionalism, the internal/external problematic
underpinning resiliency runs the danger of treating territorial politics as no more than the effect
of extrinsic forces rather than constituted by and
through territorial interests. Pastor et al. (2009)
suggest that the question of regional resilience
must be premised upon knowledge of how
regional coalitions (i.e. territorial political
interests) are constituted in the first place. In a
similar vein, Pike et al. (2010) ask whether
regional and local institutions can develop
‘adaptive capabilities’ and respond to the
challenges of globalization and state rescaling.
Their analysis leaves some scope in regional
development/resilience theory for examining
territorial politics from the ‘bottom up’.
Perhaps the problem hitherto with relational
thinking around regions has been a tendency to
overemphasize territorial politics as a response
to external flows and mobility and, correspondingly, to underemphasize internal territorial interests, constraints and problems of immobility. It is
in both of these respects that questions of territory
and territorial politics must remain salient in
regional development theory.
V Territory, territoriality and the
regionalizing state
Territory and territoriality are notoriously
difficult concepts to pin down. As the above discussion of resiliency suggests, there is always
the danger of resorting to biological metaphors
of territory – metaphors in which questions of
human agency, power and territorial politics are
frequently obscured or elided. As Elden (2009:
xxvi) suggests, territory is ‘a political and legal
term concerning the relationship between sovereignty, land, and people’. Questions of territory
and territorial integrity have traditionally been
linked to examinations of the nation state and
geopolitical processes operating above it. Only
to a lesser extent have they informed critical
discussions of regionalism and regional development politics inside the state. Elden (2009)
argues that territory and territoriality should not
necessarily be conflated with the state and sovereignty especially where, for instance, questions
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Jonas
269
of land, resources, economic development and
citizen rights are at stake. Nonetheless there are
signs that the development of new critical
approaches to territory and territoriality are starting to inform new interpretations of regional
state space and territorial politics.
For example, Brenner and Elden (2009) offer
a new interpretation of state space drawing
extensively on Henri Lefebvre’s work. They
place particular emphasis on how Lefebvre’s
writings shed light on questions of territory and
spatial politics inside the state (or, as Lefebvre
put it, ‘spatial policy’). Among his many insights
into state space, Lefebvre saw regionalization as
tied up closely with the withering away of the
state and the rise of autogestion. As Brenner and
Elden explain, autogestion is hard to define but
in general terms seems to refer to grass-roots
political actions and working-class social movements seeking to secure greater control and
autonomy from the state. Drawing extensively
on Lefebvre, Brenner (2009: 129) has recently
affirmed the arguments spelled out in his earlier
monograph, New State Spaces (Brenner, 2004),
that ‘the reorientation of state spatial strategies
from nationally redistributive modalities towards
urban-centric, competitiveness-oriented forms of
locational policy still appears quite pervasive
across the EU [European Union]’. Brenner’s take
on metropolitan regionalism links the appearance
of interspatial competition and regional development to the capacity of the state apparatus to manage, reconfigure and orchestrate the territorial
politics of distribution across a range of state
territorial scales (see also Brenner, 2002).
Cox (2009) suggests that recent work by the
likes of Brenner on state rescaling has generally
been good at showing how state strategies with
respect to regions and city-regions constitute
responses to wider political and economic
trends. But it has been less convincing on how
state rescaling and regulatory processes are
territorialized and how territorial politics (e.g.
regionalist tendencies, central-local relations,
class-based territorial politics) can in turn shape
wider processes of regulation and state rescaling.
Cox suggests that more work needs to be done on
showing how territorial politics are constitutive
of state restructuring and rescaling rather than
the other way round. In a similar vein, Jonas
and Pincetl (2006) have argued in the context
of an empirical study of the New Regionalism
in California that the rescaling of the state and
governance around regions could be as much a
strategic ‘bottom-up’ outcome of organized
business interests as it is a solution which is
pursued in a unidirectional ‘top-down’ fashion
by (central) state interests. Likewise the distinction Harrison (2008b) draws between ‘centrally
orchestrated regionalism’ and ‘regionally orchestrated centralism’ is suggestive of the different
ways in which regionalism is underpinned by
territorial politics.
Instead of relying on a notion of territory and
territorial politics as the outcome of wider processes of globalization and state rescaling, it
should be possible to show how regional strategies of economic development and state redistribution are contingent upon territorial politics.
Park (2008) demonstrates how territorial politics
have been important in framing the ways in
which the Korean state has reorganized its scalar
divisions of labour. Attempts to introduce new
regional and city-regional state spaces reflect
and embody central-local tensions inside the
Korean state. In a similar vein, Moisio (2008)
examines the political actions and discourses
that have underpinned particular acts of spatial
state transformation in Finland, such as the rise
of competitive city-regionalism as a state spatial
policy. He argues that this development is premised on how business and political elites have
rethought Finland’s role in the wider global
economy. One increasingly influential policy
discourse is that the survival of Finland depends
on its ability to compete in the global economy,
which means abandoning policies in pursuit of
regional equality and promoting the growth of
Helsinki and the surrounding region of southern
Finland. Moisio concludes inter alia that:
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Progress in Human Geography 36(2)
This kind of argumentation . . . clearly diminishes
the absolute value of the state territory and national
peripheries. At the same time it means that regions
other than the Greater Helsinki region and the two
or three largest ‘provincial growth engines’ are very
hard to be seen as having a role in the pursuit of
economic competitiveness by the Finnish state.
(Moisio, 2008: 23)
The above examples demonstrate the different
ways in which the state’s approach to regional
economic development is fundamentally premised upon a particular understanding of territory
and territorial politics. In each case, regionalism
is examined both in relation to threats and opportunities external to state space and at the same
time in terms of territorial-distributional politics
internal to the state.
VI Conclusion
In this progress report, I have commented on the
recent tendency to decouple regions and regional
development processes from bounded notions of
state and territory and, correspondingly, to connect regions and regionalism to wider flows, networks and processes of economic globalization
and neoliberalism. In doing so, the regionalism
problematic has become theoretically disconnected from crucial questions of territory and
territorial politics. Consequently, there is a sense
in which such work could be exaggerating the
importance of relational (i.e. non-territorial)
processes in shaping regional development
politics. It could eventually lead to an intellectual
backlash against relational thinking and selfstyled ‘non-scalist’ interpretations of regions and
spatial politics.
Evidence suggests that regional analysis must
at the very least take into account how some
regional economic and political interests continue to be expressed in a territorial fashion
(Prytherch, 2010). Far from reflecting residual
or antediluvian political identities, new (and old)
regions offer all sorts of opportunities and possibilities not only for the creation of new political
identities but also for new and alternative regional
economic discourses to be forged against mainstream ideas about globalization, state restructuring and competition. In this respect, the
analysis of regions offers scope for intellectual
resiliency in the face of uncertain global
economic and political times. Progress on the
regionalism question will require further examples both of relational thinking about territorial
politics and of territorial thinking about relational
processes.
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