paasi, place and region

7/30/2019 Paasi, Place and Region

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Place and region: regional worlds andwords

Anssi PaasiDepartment of Geography, Box 3000, 90014, University of Oulu, Finland

I Introduction

Following the long descent of regional geography and some pleas that regions shouldbe studied in theoretically informed ways (Gregory, 1978), new regional geographybecame an attractive category in the late 1980s. This label, proposed by Thrift (1983; cf.

Johnston, 1985), became popular by virtue of the review by Gilbert (1988), who broughttogether various perspectives on the concept of region such as the Marxist andhumanist approaches and theories of practice, but some others saw this simply as aproject coming from the left (Sayer, 1989). New regional geography was and still is asomewhat ambivalent brand: while some authors evaluated by Gilbert noted the needto reconceptualize region/place, very few suggested any new regional geography assuch. It has not become a coherent approach so far, but rather an umbrella term forresearch reflecting how regions/places can be constituted by and constitutive of sociallife, relations and identity (but see Thrift, 1994; 1998).

Region and place continue to be significant categories in human geography, but

increasingly in other fields, too (Auge, 1995; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Escobar, 2001Keating, 2001), and their meanings are in flux. In spite of their importance, both areoften taken as given or as subjugated to questions of economy, culture or identity, i.e.,phenomena or processes occurring in given regions/places. Geographers have never-theless theorized during the last two decades over such problems as howregions/places are produced and reproduced as part of the broader social productionof space (Thrift, 1983; Pred, 1984; Paasi, 1991; Taylor, 1991; Entrikin, 1991; Murphy, 1991;Massey, 1995; Sack, 1997; Allen et al., 1998; MacLeod, 1998). I will look in this report atcurrent views on region and place and at the relations between these categories, andfinally try to contextualize the existing views and arguments.

Progress in Human Geography26,6 (2002) pp. 802811


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II Region and research practice

When Smith (1996: 190) suggests that good concepts are flexible, ambiguous, suitableto any occasion, and fit for any eventuality, he shows how ambivalent region and placehave remained in geography. In spite of the diffusion of influences across nationalboundaries, scholars operating in different language-bound, historically contingentregional worlds or spaces of knowledge (Livingstone, 1995; Gregory, 1998) use anddevelop concepts and approaches that only partly overlap. Existing conceptualizationsthus reflect social including academic practices, contexts and constellations ofpower. One important structural factor is location among the humanities or the naturalor social sciences. This may influence crucially how basic categories are shaped andwhat interpretations are found acceptable in society and in the academic world (Becher,1989). The review by Gilbert (1988) made this clear with regard to the French andEnglish-speaking worlds, but geographers in Germany (Werlen, 1997; Wollersheim et

al., 1998; Bahrenberg and Kuhm, 1999), The Netherlands (Hoekveld and Hoekveld-Meijer, 1995; Terlouw, 2001) and Scandinavia (Paasi, 1991; Baerenholt, 1998; Hkli,1998), for example, have also carried out theoretically informed research intoregion/place, often reflecting economic, cultural and political problems in theirnational contexts. Regional words thus always reflect the regional worlds in whichthey have been developed (cf. Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 168).

(Key) Words and concepts are not the same thing. While the words region or placehave proved to be lasting names for geographical concepts, the concepts themselveshave been less permanent representations of categories of things or ideas. The trans-forming of social and disciplinary practices is a perpetual challenge to existing concep-

tualizations. The development of concepts should be based on abstractions that definethese concepts in relation to the practices, discourses and power relations throughwhich certain regions or places and the ideas of them have become what they are.Although state governance is still the major context for region (and identity) building,a re-scaling is currently taking place. It is to an increasing extent the internationalmarkets and regional political responses to global capitalism (such as the continentalregime in Europe) that generate regionalism and accentuate the importance of regions(Keating, 1998; 2001). This implies a new politico-economic direction in the under-standing of region and place in a world where the established state-based scalar logicis eroding and a more flexible understanding of current spatialities is needed (Amin,2002).

Regional worlds are also affected by new conceptualizations and discourses, sincethese are tools for both producing and interpreting social transformations (Foucault,1970). Studies of spaces of regionalism show that regions continue to be significantelements in political mobilization, and that identity/ideology building often occurs inrelation to other regional spaces (Keating, 2001; Giordano, 2000; Agnew, 2001; Jones,2001, Jones and MacLeod, 2001). Spatial categories are hence an important part ofongoing social reproduction, political economy, identity and citizenship building on allspatial scales.

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804 Place and region

III Regional geographies in the making

In her review of methodological approaches to regions, Gilbert (1988) expanded thestatic typologies of regions, such as the distinctions between formal, functional,perceptual and administrative regions. As a further step, an analytical distinction canbe made between three ideas of region that geographers perpetually lean back on: thepre-scientific, discipline-centred and critical ideas (Paasi, 1996a). The pre-scientific viewimplies that region is a practical choice, a given spatial unit (statistical area, munici-pality or locality), which is needed for collecting/representing data but which has noparticular conceptual role. This view is typical of applied and comparative research(Tomaney and Ward, 2001). The current Europe of regions provides a particularlytempting grid of regions (and data) that are often taken for granted. While comparativestudies are often based on given (statistical) areas, these units should not be regardedas neutral backgrounds, since regions are implicated in the social processes underscrutiny.

The discipline-centred view of regions regards them as objects (e.g., traditionalLandschaft geography) or results of the research process, often formal or functional clas-sifications of empirical elements. These views are often used to legitimate a specificgeographical perspective hence the debates as to whether regions are real units orimagined, mental categories (Minshull, 1967; Agnew, 2001). These debates are not onlya historical curiosity but are fitting illustrations of the struggle over legitimate concep-tualizations. The resulting regions are examples of academic socialization andpower/knowledge relations, but they also show the power of geography, in that oncethey have been invented they can be powerful in shaping the spatial imagination andspatial action, e.g., in governance. School and university geography textbooks, for theirpart, still often represent naturalized narratives of a homology between boundedspaces and national/cultural groups. One perpetual challenge is to deconstruct thegeographical assumptions and inclusions/exclusions that these narratives imply onall spatial scales (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Bell, 2001).

Critical approaches emerge from social practice, relations and discourse, and strive toconceptualize spatialities as part of a wider network of cultural, political and economicprocesses and of divisions of labour. Most work labelled as new regional geographybelongs here, including that which involves mapping individual/social identities(Thrift, 1998) or regarding regions as manifestations of capital accumulation (Massey,1978) or settings for interaction (Thrift, 1983). While these approaches have normallybeen pursued separately, a critical regional geography should ideally combine thepolitico-economic approaches with questions of subjectification and identity formation(Paasi, 1996b). Further, the view of regions as processes stresses both the importance ofa historical perspective for understanding them as part of a broader process of regionaltransformation and the conceptualization of the scales of history in each case (Paasi,1991; Taylor, 1991).

Critical approaches suggest that regions are social constructs (Entrikin, 1996; Allenet al., 1998; Agnew, 2001). While critical research may also take regions as given(Murphy, 1991), geographers use the social construction of regions in most cases to refer

to historically contingent practices and discourses in which actors produce and givemeaning to more or less bounded material and symbolic worlds not only to thecooperation of individual minds to create intersubjective meanings. Most social


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collectives, such as nations, are identified as imagined communities where spatialboundaries may be important constituents (Anderson, 1991), but, besides imagination,these collectives exist firmly in social practice. Similarly, regions are based at times oncollective social classifications/identifications, but more often on multiple practices inwhich the hegemonic narratives of a specific regional entity and identity are produced,

become institutionalized and are then reproduced (and challenged) by social actorswithin a broader spatial division of labour. Regions, their boundaries, symbols andinstitutions are hence not results of autonomous and evolutionary processes butexpressions of a perpetual struggle over the meanings associated with space, represen-tation, democracy and welfare. The institutionalization of regions may take place on allspatial scales, not only between the local level and the state (Paasi, 1991). Actors andorganizations involved in the territorialization of space may act both inside and outsideregions.

All this means that geographers have been forced to rethink the question of theobjectivity of regions and to understand them as processes that are performed, limited,symbolized and institutionalized through numerous practices and discourses that arenot inevitably bound to a specific scale. Regions are thus complicated institutionalstructures, institutional facts, because they are dependent on human agreement andinstitutions (Searle, 1995), such as the media, the education system, political organiza-tion, governance and economics most of them operating across scales. Regionbuilding always includes normative components because institutional structures arestructures of rules, power and trust, in which boundaries, symbols and institutionsmerge through material practice. Once created, they are also social facts, since they cangenerate (and are generated by) action as long as people believe in them, and as long asthey have a role in publicity spaces or in governance. This action may be simultane-ously reproductive, resistant or transformative.

Regions are complicated ideological and material media of power for individuals andsocial groups that researchers can conceptualize from different angles. The discourseson regions and regionalization, in which power-holding actors invest their interests andpresuppositions in things and words, may actually gradually create the reality thatthey are describing or suggesting. A fitting example is the EU, where new governmen-tal practices have increased radically the number of region/identity builders actorswho operate with regions, and who write, talk and draw public representations tomarket them (Paasi, 2002). Practical classifications statements of what regionalizations

and regions are are orientated towards the production of social effects andimpregnated with power (Bourdieu, 1991). Thus these new spaces of action andpublicity may finally affect the distribution of resources and the life of the people in theregions.

IV Region and place in a globalizing world

Most regional categories are laden with historical connotations that do not normallychange rapidly although they may be constantly challenged. The major current

challenges are the transformations occurring in economics, governance and politics,in fact harking back to the earliest English uses of the word region: to rule.These economic and administrative connotations are evident, e.g., in the debates on

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globalization, changing forms of communication or the rise of the Europe of regions.Interdisciplinary research in this context has been carried out into new regionalism,new forms of regulation, de-/reterritorialization, re-scaling of (state) governance andsovereignty, and into regional identity (Keating, 2001; Le Gals and Lequesne, 1998;Calleya, 2000; Pierre, 2000; Krasner, 2001; MacLeod, 1998; MacLeod and Jones, 2002;

Paasi, 2001; Tomaney and Ward, 2001; Jones, 2001). Particularly useful reviews of thespatiality of current political economic tendencies are MacLeod (2001) and Amin (2002).

Thrift (1998) aptly recalls that, however different the accounts of globalization maybe, the notion of region is central to each of them. In spite of this new interest in regions(and places), many researchers have tended to conceptualize phenomena and processesoccurring in and between regions rather than theorizing over regions as parts of theseprocesses. Another problem is that the region has been understood as a given scalebetween the state and the local (Scott, 1998), a view that is currently changing asattention is coming to be paid to the multiple processes and scales of social reproduc-tion (Swyngedouw, 1997; Brenner, 1998; 2001; Dicken and Malmberg, 2001; Marston,2000; Marston and Smith, 2001; Amin, 2002).

It is partly due to the association of region with governance/territoriality and thenaturalized view of regional as a level between local and national that the notion ofplace is increasingly being preferred today. It is perhaps symptomatic that the wordregion is not included in the indices of such important books as Douglas et al. (1996),Harvey (1996), Massey et al. (1999), Adams et al. (2001), Sack (1997), Scott (1998) orStorper (1997). Even though geographers often understand place and region assynonymous (Pred, 1984; Johnston, 1991; Allen et al., 1998) or use a scale based on suchcategories (local/supra-local) (Entrikin, 1989; 1991) or the relation of these categories tospatial experience (May, 1970; Tuan, 1975) as arguments to distinguish them from eachother, the current interest in place implies the old etymological meaning of place as abroad way or open space, not a return to the particular, unique or generic qualitiesof place.

Place is one of the most multilayered and multipurpose key words in current geo-graphical language (Harvey, 1996: 208). Hence place is conceptualized flexibly, ad hoc,without any presuppositions of scale, showing a relativist tendency to leave the generalmeanings of categories open. Place is thus understood contextually (and at timesmetaphorically) in relation to ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, body, self, etc., often insuch a manner that it becomes one constitutive element in the politics of identity(Massey et al., 1999).

While location and the local scale have been part of the traditional geographicalunderstanding of place, humanistic geographers did not fix place to any scale butdefined it in relation to (localized) human (intersubjective) experience (Tuan, 1975).Current views are becoming increasingly more open and reflect the cultural, moral andeconomic dimensions prevailing in local-global relations (Relph, 1996; Sack, 1997;Adams et al., 2001; Escobar, 2001). Entrikin (1999) argues that the moral significance ofplace becomes evident when places are conceived of not as locations in space but asbeing related to individual subjects, as processes mediating between the particular andthe universal.

Critical human geographers similarly do not fix place to any scale but argue for moreopen horizons: if space is thought of as a set of social relations that are stretched out,then places are locations of particular sets of intersecting social relations (Massey, 1995;


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Massey et al., 1999) and governance/planning (Madanipour et al., 2001). Allen et al.(1998) also understand region in this way, using the prosperous southeast of Englandas an example. Thrift (1998) takes the same example in his account of the new regionalgeography, but asks whether such multinodal sets of successful agglomerations areplanar regions at all (cf. Tomaney and Ward; 2001, and Jones and MacLeod; 2001, on

the northeast region, where economic decline has created cohesion). The topographi-cal view of Amin (2002) on globalization and its rejection of oppositions such asplace/space, proximity/distance and scaling/re-scaling might be helpful in clarifyingcurrent conceptualizations.

Traditional ideas of region/place as bounded spaces have thus been challenged and not only in new regional geography. Criticism of the account of the world as amosaic of separate cultures (Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Olwig andHastrup, 1997) has been endorsed by cultural (Jackson and Penrose, 1993; Sibley, 1995)and political geographers (Agnew, 1994; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996) and by IRscholars (Shapiro, 1999). These interdisciplinary views force us to reflect on boundariesin new ways. While both the ultra-liberal rhetoric of the borderless world (Ohmae,1995) and the view on the links between identity and boundaries (Conversi, 1995; Pratt,1999) have gained support on a general level, the question of whether aplace/region/territory should be understood as a bounded unit is of course morecomplicated. As in the case of state territoriality (Taylor, 1994), the various organiza-tions, institutions and actors involved in the institutionalization of a region may havedifferent strategies with regard to the meaning and functions of the region and itsidentity (cf. Allen et al., 1998: 34). Regions may be open to economic or culturalprocesses and concomitantly territorially governed. Some people may identifythemselves passionately with the region, others may have a less affective attitude, whilesome may raise strong resistance to hegemonic spatialized identity narratives andpractices. Thus a region/place may be bounded in some sense but not in others. Theidea of a boundary as a dividing line is just one possible conceptualization that hasguided (political) geographical thinking since the institutionalization of the field.Boundaries cannot be written off, but new interpretations of their meanings in social lifecan be developed. Boundaries occur not only at the edges of regions, but are to befound everywhere within them, in innumerable practices and discourses that have tobe conceptualized and analysed to make visible the strategies of power that aresedimented in collective identity narratives. Boundaries are a terrain of mixing andblurring, where material, symbolic and power relations become fused (Paasi, 2003).

New horizons have thus challenged the uniqueness of place, emphasizing opennessand a multiscalar character but often ignoring human experience (but see Agnew, 1987;Taylor, 1999). An analytic distinction between place and region renders possible oneinterpretation of the multidimensionality of spatiality which is usually lost in newregional geographies that take the two terms as synonymous. If regions are conceptu-alized as multiscalar institutional structures, places can be conceptualized ascumulative archives of personal spatial experience emerging from unique webs ofsituated life episodes. Place is thus not bound to any specific location but conceptual-ized from the perspective of personal and family/household histories and life stories.

There is no necessary link between people and a specific location. People increasinglychange their positions and cross borders as (im)migrants, guest workers, refugees,asylum seekers, tourists and users of media. Different materialized and metaphorical

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locations become embodied and accumulate in their moving bodies and experience(cf. Thrift, 1999). Individual life histories and meanings are always social, since they arepositioned in practices and discourses based on family, class, gender, ethnicity,generations and, more broadly, social history. None of these elements is bound only toa specific location or region. Region and place become fused in inevitably contested

institutional practices, discourse and memory. This conceptualization of place rendersit possible to locate experience and meaning in increasingly dynamic regional worlds.One example of this is provided by Fullilove (1999; also, 1996), who reflects theimportance of place by drawing on both her life geography as a member of amultiethnic family and various documents.

These thoughts resemble the ideas of Thrift (1998) on the new New regionalgeography, a specific theoretical, methodological and political stance that stressesinterconnectedness, hybridity and possibility. This non-representational approachopens up three important research questions (p. 44): how the structures of powerdominating everyday lives are built up from a range of materials, how subjectivity is

built up performatively and productively as a part of these structures, and how spaceintervenes and is constituted. Accordingly, Thrift wants to shift attention fromdiscursive and contemplative models of human action to practices and tactile issuessuch as affects, passions and dreaming.

V Conclusions

Regional worlds are increasingly complex and their origins and meanings are hiddenin numerous social practices and discourses that fuse various spatial scales. Similarly,

current views of region and place are contested and are characterized by discontinu-ities and asymmetries. These developments have challenged the existing disciplinaryboundaries and those between regional, cultural, economic and political geography.This is indeed a fascinating moment for geographers to reflect contextually on howsocial relations, institutional structures, ideologies, symbols and subjectivity/identitycome together in discourses and practices through which both regions/places andnarratives on them come into being, exist and disappear. It remains to be seen whetherthis complex field will provide geographers with conceptual and methodological toolsfor developing a more coherent agenda for a new regional geography. Or will it stillbe the case, as noted a decade ago by Johnston (1991: 67), that we do not need regional

geography but we do need regions in geography. In both cases, region and place willstill be major conceptual elements in the field.

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