The Contested Construction of Regions: Geographical Imagination and Everyday Practice

Abstract

In the course of the history of regional geography the concept of region has progressed from its naturalist and objectivist stage towards a constructivist meaning. Increasingly following the constructivist premises the making of regions has become the major focus of current regional geography - in the course of scientific inquiry and definition, in political and public discourses, and in everyday routine practice.

From a constructivist perspective, the paper offers a framework on the different kinds of region-building processes and practices, especially focussing on the involved aspects of coherence and tension. Four of these aspects will be discussed in detail: the ontological designation of the region as either “natural” or “artificial”, normative evaluations of the region-building process as either “top-down” or “bottom-up”, the spatial conception of the region as based on either territorial or relational geographies, and the implicit social relations of region-making, in the sense of coherence and tensions between economic practices (exchange) and cultural coherence (sharing).

These four aspects will be shortly illustrated with reference to the example of Patagonia in order to grasp the manifold practices of region-making and to further specify what it means to consider regions as social constructions.