Progress in Human Geography 26,6 (2002) pp.

802811

Place and region: regional worlds and

words
Anssi Paasi
Department of Geography, Box 3000, 90014, University of Oulu, Finland

I Introduction

Following the long descent of regional geography and some pleas that regions should
be studied in theoretically informed ways (Gregory, 1978), new regional geography
became 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 brought
together various perspectives on the concept of region such as the Marxist and
humanist approaches and theories of practice, but some others saw this simply as a
project coming from the left (Sayer, 1989). New regional geography was and still is a
somewhat ambivalent brand: while some authors evaluated by Gilbert noted the need
to reconceptualize region/place, very few suggested any new regional geography as
such. It has not become a coherent approach so far, but rather an umbrella term for
research reflecting how regions/places can be constituted by and constitutive of social
life, 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, 2001
Keating, 2001), and their meanings are in flux. In spite of their importance, both are
often 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 how
regions/places are produced and reproduced as part of the broader social production
of 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 at
current views on region and place and at the relations between these categories, and
finally try to contextualize the existing views and arguments.

Arnold 2002 10.1191/0309132502ph404pr

 Anssi Paasi 803

II Region and research practice

When Smith (1996: 190) suggests that good concepts are flexible, ambiguous, suitable
to any occasion, and fit for any eventuality, he shows how ambivalent region and place
have remained in geography. In spite of the diffusion of influences across national
boundaries, scholars operating in different language-bound, historically contingent
regional worlds or spaces of knowledge (Livingstone, 1995; Gregory, 1998) use and
develop concepts and approaches that only partly overlap. Existing conceptualizations
thus reflect social including academic practices, contexts and constellations of
power. One important structural factor is location among the humanities or the natural
or social sciences. This may influence crucially how basic categories are shaped and
what 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 and
English-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 into
region/place, often reflecting economic, cultural and political problems in their
national contexts. Regional words thus always reflect the regional worlds in which
they have been developed (cf. Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996: 168).
(Key) Words and concepts are not the same thing. While the words region or place
have proved to be lasting names for geographical concepts, the concepts themselves
have 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 define
these concepts in relation to the practices, discourses and power relations through
which 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 international
markets and regional political responses to global capitalism (such as the continental
regime 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 logic
is eroding and a more flexible understanding of current spatialities is needed (Amin,
2002).
Regional worlds are also affected by new conceptualizations and discourses, since
these are tools for both producing and interpreting social transformations (Foucault,
1970). Studies of spaces of regionalism show that regions continue to be significant
elements in political mobilization, and that identity/ideology building often occurs in
relation to other regional spaces (Keating, 2001; Giordano, 2000; Agnew, 2001; Jones,
2001, Jones and MacLeod, 2001). Spatial categories are hence an important part of
ongoing social reproduction, political economy, identity and citizenship building on all
spatial scales.
804 Place and region

III Regional geographies in the making

In her review of methodological approaches to regions, Gilbert (1988) expanded the

static typologies of regions, such as the distinctions between formal, functional,
perceptual and administrative regions. As a further step, an analytical distinction can
be made between three ideas of region that geographers perpetually lean back on: the
pre-scientific, discipline-centred and critical ideas (Paasi, 1996a). The pre-scientific view
implies 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 no
particular conceptual role. This view is typical of applied and comparative research
(Tomaney and Ward, 2001). The current Europe of regions provides a particularly
tempting grid of regions (and data) that are often taken for granted. While comparative
studies are often based on given (statistical) areas, these units should not be regarded
as neutral backgrounds, since regions are implicated in the social processes under
scrutiny.
The discipline-centred view of regions regards them as objects (e.g., traditional
Landschaft geography) or results of the research process, often formal or functional clas-
sifications of empirical elements. These views are often used to legitimate a specific
geographical perspective hence the debates as to whether regions are real units or
imagined, mental categories (Minshull, 1967; Agnew, 2001). These debates are not only
a historical curiosity but are fitting illustrations of the struggle over legitimate concep-
tualizations. The resulting regions are examples of academic socialization and
power/knowledge relations, but they also show the power of geography, in that once
they have been invented they can be powerful in shaping the spatial imagination and
spatial action, e.g., in governance. School and university geography textbooks, for their
part, still often represent naturalized narratives of a homology between bounded
spaces and national/cultural groups. One perpetual challenge is to deconstruct the
geographical assumptions and inclusions/exclusions that these narratives imply on
all spatial scales (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Bell, 2001).
Critical approaches emerge from social practice, relations and discourse, and strive to
conceptualize spatialities as part of a wider network of cultural, political and economic
processes and of divisions of labour. Most work labelled as new regional geography
belongs 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 normally
been pursued separately, a critical regional geography should ideally combine the
politico-economic approaches with questions of subjectification and identity formation
(Paasi, 1996b). Further, the view of regions as processes stresses both the importance of
a historical perspective for understanding them as part of a broader process of regional
transformation 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; Allen
et 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 give
meaning to more or less bounded material and symbolic worlds not only to the
cooperation of individual minds to create intersubjective meanings. Most social
 Anssi Paasi 805

collectives, such as nations, are identified as imagined communities where spatial

boundaries may be important constituents (Anderson, 1991), but, besides imagination,
these collectives exist firmly in social practice. Similarly, regions are based at times on
collective social classifications/identifications, but more often on multiple practices in
which the hegemonic narratives of a specific regional entity and identity are produced,
become institutionalized and are then reproduced (and challenged) by social actors
within a broader spatial division of labour. Regions, their boundaries, symbols and
institutions are hence not results of autonomous and evolutionary processes but
expressions of a perpetual struggle over the meanings associated with space, represen-
tation, democracy and welfare. The institutionalization of regions may take place on all
spatial scales, not only between the local level and the state (Paasi, 1991). Actors and
organizations involved in the territorialization of space may act both inside and outside
regions.
All this means that geographers have been forced to rethink the question of the
objectivity of regions and to understand them as processes that are performed, limited,
symbolized and institutionalized through numerous practices and discourses that are
not inevitably bound to a specific scale. Regions are thus complicated institutional
structures, institutional facts, because they are dependent on human agreement and
institutions (Searle, 1995), such as the media, the education system, political organiza-
tion, governance and economics most of them operating across scales. Region
building always includes normative components because institutional structures are
structures of rules, power and trust, in which boundaries, symbols and institutions
merge through material practice. Once created, they are also social facts, since they can
generate (and are generated by) action as long as people believe in them, and as long as
they 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 and
social groups that researchers can conceptualize from different angles. The discourses
on regions and regionalization, in which power-holding actors invest their interests and
presuppositions in things and words, may actually gradually create the reality that
they are describing or suggesting. A fitting example is the EU, where new governmen-
tal practices have increased radically the number of region/identity builders actors
who operate with regions, and who write, talk and draw public representations to
market them (Paasi, 2002). Practical classifications statements of what regionalizations
and regions are are orientated towards the production of social effects and
impregnated with power (Bourdieu, 1991). Thus these new spaces of action and
publicity may finally affect the distribution of resources and the life of the people in the
regions.

IV Region and place in a globalizing world

Most regional categories are laden with historical connotations that do not normally
change 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
806 Place and region

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 and
sovereignty, 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 the
spatiality of current political economic tendencies are MacLeod (2001) and Amin (2002).
Thrift (1998) aptly recalls that, however different the accounts of globalization may
be, 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 processes
occurring in and between regions rather than theorizing over regions as parts of these
processes. Another problem is that the region has been understood as a given scale
between the state and the local (Scott, 1998), a view that is currently changing as
attention 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 the
naturalized view of regional as a level between local and national that the notion of
place is increasingly being preferred today. It is perhaps symptomatic that the word
region 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) or
Storper (1997). Even though geographers often understand place and region as
synonymous (Pred, 1984; Johnston, 1991; Allen et al., 1998) or use a scale based on such
categories (local/supra-local) (Entrikin, 1989; 1991) or the relation of these categories to
spatial experience (May, 1970; Tuan, 1975) as arguments to distinguish them from each
other, the current interest in place implies the old etymological meaning of place as a
broad way or open space, not a return to the particular, unique or generic qualities
of 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 general
meanings of categories open. Place is thus understood contextually (and at times
metaphorically) in relation to ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, body, self, etc., often in
such 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 geographical
understanding of place, humanistic geographers did not fix place to any scale but
defined it in relation to (localized) human (intersubjective) experience (Tuan, 1975).
Current views are becoming increasingly more open and reflect the cultural, moral and
economic dimensions prevailing in local-global relations (Relph, 1996; Sack, 1997;
Adams et al., 2001; Escobar, 2001). Entrikin (1999) argues that the moral significance of
place becomes evident when places are conceived of not as locations in space but as
being related to individual subjects, as processes mediating between the particular and
the universal.
Critical human geographers similarly do not fix place to any scale but argue for more
open 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;
 Anssi Paasi 807

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 England
as an example. Thrift (1998) takes the same example in his account of the new regional
geography, but asks whether such multinodal sets of successful agglomerations are
planar 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 as
place/space, proximity/distance and scaling/re-scaling might be helpful in clarifying
current 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 a
mosaic of separate cultures (Appadurai, 1996; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Olwig and
Hastrup, 1997) has been endorsed by cultural (Jackson and Penrose, 1993; Sibley, 1995)
and political geographers (Agnew, 1994; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996) and by IR
scholars (Shapiro, 1999). These interdisciplinary views force us to reflect on boundaries
in 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 a
place/region/territory should be understood as a bounded unit is of course more
complicated. As in the case of state territoriality (Taylor, 1994), the various organiza-
tions, institutions and actors involved in the institutionalization of a region may have
different strategies with regard to the meaning and functions of the region and its
identity (cf. Allen et al., 1998: 34). Regions may be open to economic or cultural
processes and concomitantly territorially governed. Some people may identify
themselves passionately with the region, others may have a less affective attitude, while
some may raise strong resistance to hegemonic spatialized identity narratives and
practices. Thus a region/place may be bounded in some sense but not in others. The
idea of a boundary as a dividing line is just one possible conceptualization that has
guided (political) geographical thinking since the institutionalization of the field.
Boundaries cannot be written off, but new interpretations of their meanings in social life
can be developed. Boundaries occur not only at the edges of regions, but are to be
found everywhere within them, in innumerable practices and discourses that have to
be conceptualized and analysed to make visible the strategies of power that are
sedimented in collective identity narratives. Boundaries are a terrain of mixing and
blurring, where material, symbolic and power relations become fused (Paasi, 2003).
New horizons have thus challenged the uniqueness of place, emphasizing openness
and a multiscalar character but often ignoring human experience (but see Agnew, 1987;
Taylor, 1999). An analytic distinction between place and region renders possible one
interpretation of the multidimensionality of spatiality which is usually lost in new
regional geographies that take the two terms as synonymous. If regions are conceptu-
alized as multiscalar institutional structures, places can be conceptualized as
cumulative archives of personal spatial experience emerging from unique webs of
situated 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 increasingly
change their positions and cross borders as (im)migrants, guest workers, refugees,
asylum seekers, tourists and users of media. Different materialized and metaphorical
808 Place and region

locations become embodied and accumulate in their moving bodies and experience
(cf. Thrift, 1999). Individual life histories and meanings are always social, since they are
positioned in practices and discourses based on family, class, gender, ethnicity,
generations and, more broadly, social history. None of these elements is bound only to
a specific location or region. Region and place become fused in inevitably contested
institutional practices, discourse and memory. This conceptualization of place renders
it possible to locate experience and meaning in increasingly dynamic regional worlds.
One example of this is provided by Fullilove (1999; also, 1996), who reflects the
importance of place by drawing on both her life geography as a member of a
multiethnic family and various documents.
These thoughts resemble the ideas of Thrift (1998) on the new New regional
geography, a specific theoretical, methodological and political stance that stresses
interconnectedness, hybridity and possibility. This non-representational approach
opens up three important research questions (p. 44): how the structures of power
dominating 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 space
intervenes and is constituted. Accordingly, Thrift wants to shift attention from
discursive and contemplative models of human action to practices and tactile issues
such as affects, passions and dreaming.

V Conclusions

Regional worlds are increasingly complex and their origins and meanings are hidden
in 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 disciplinary
boundaries and those between regional, cultural, economic and political geography.
This is indeed a fascinating moment for geographers to reflect contextually on how
social relations, institutional structures, ideologies, symbols and subjectivity/identity
come together in discourses and practices through which both regions/places and
narratives on them come into being, exist and disappear. It remains to be seen whether
this complex field will provide geographers with conceptual and methodological tools
for developing a more coherent agenda for a new regional geography. Or will it still
be 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 will
still be major conceptual elements in the field.

References

Adams, P., Hoelscher, S. and Till, K.E., editors Review of International Political Economy 1,
2001: Textures of place: exploring humanist 5380.
geographies . Minneapolis: University of 2001: Regions in revolt. Progress in Human
Minnesota Press. Geography 25, 10310.
Agnew, J.A. 1987: Place and politics. Boston: Allen Allen, J., Massey, D. and Cochrane, A. 1998:
and Unwin. Rethinking the region. London: Routledge.
1994: The territorial trap: the geographical Amin, A. 2002: Spatialities of globalization.
assumptions of international relations theory. Environment and Planning A 34, 38599.

Anderson, B. 1991: Imagined communities.
London: Verso.
Appadurai, A. 1996: Modernity at large.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Auge, M. 1995: Non-places: introduction to an
anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.
Baerenholdt, J.O. 1998: Regioner er politiske rum
ogs for geografer! Nordisk Samhllgeografisk
Tidskrift 26, 321.
Bahrenberg, G. and Kuhm, K. 1999: Weltgesell-
schaft und Region eine systemtheoretische
Perspective. Geographische Zeitschrift 87,
193209.
Becher, T. 1989: Academic tribes and territories:
intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Bell, J.E. 2001: Questioning place while building
a regional geography of the former Soviet
Union. Journal of Geography 100, 7886.
Bourdieu, P. 1991: Language and symbolic power.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brenner, N. 1998: Between fixity and motion:
accumulation, territorial organization and the
historical geography of spatial scales. Environ-
ment and Planning D: Society and Space 16,
45981.
2001: The limits to scale? Methodological
reflections on scalar structuration. Progress in
Human Geography 25, 591614.
Calleya, S.C. 2000: Regionalism in the post-cold war
world. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Conversi, D. 1995: Reassessing current theories
of nationalism: nationalism as boundary
maintenance and creation. Nationalism and
Ethnic Politics 1, 7385.
Dicken, P. and Malmberg, A. 2001: Firms in
territories: a relational perspective. Economic
Geography 77, 34563.
Douglas, I., Huggett, R. and Robinson, M.,
editors 1996: Companion encyclopedia of
geography. London: Routledge.
Entrikin, J.N. 1989: Place, region and modernity.
In Agnew, J.A. and Duncan, J.S., editors, The
power of place, London: Unwin and Hyman,
3043.
1991: The betweenness of place: towards a
geography of modernity. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
1996: Place and region 2. Progress in Human
Geography 20, 21521.
1999: Political community, identity and
cosmopolitan place. International Sociology 14,
Anssi Paasi 809
26982.
Escobar, A. 2001: Culture sits in places:
reflections on globalism and subaltern
strategies of localization. Political Geography 20,
13974.
Foucault, M. 1970: The order of things. New York:
Random House.
Fullilove, M.T. 1996: Psychiatric implications of
displacement: contributions from the
psychology of place. American Journal of
Psychiatry 153, 151623.
1999: The house of Joshua: meditations on family
and place. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Gilbert, A. 1988: The new regional geography in
English and French-speaking countries.
Progress in Human Geography 12, 20828.
Giordano, B. 2000: Italian regionalism or
Padanian nationalism the political project of
the Lega Nord in Italian politics. Political
Geography 19, 44571.
Gregory, D. 1978: Ideology, science and human
geography. London: Hutchinson.
1998: The geographical discourse of
modernity. In Explorations in Critical Human
Geography, Hettner-Lecture 1997, Department of
Geography, University of Heidelberg, 4567.
Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J., editors 1997: Culture,
power, place. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
Harvey, D. 1996: Justice, nature and the geography of
difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hoekveld, G.A. and Hoekveld-Meijer, G. 1995:
The region as cloister. The relation between
society and region reconsidered. Geografiska
Annaler B 77, 15976.
Hkli, J. 1998: Discourse in the production of
political space: decolonizing the symbolism of
provinces in Finland. Political Geography 17,
33163.
Jackson, P. and Penrose, J., editors 1993:
Constructions of race, place and nation. London:
UCL Press.
Johnston, R.J. 1985: Places matter. Irish Geography
18, 5963.
1991: A question of place. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jones, M. 2001: The rise of regional state in
economic governance: partnership for
prosperity or new scales of state power.
Environment and Planning A 33, 1185211.
Jones, R. 2001: Institutional identities and the
shifting scales of state governance in the
810 Place and region
United Kingdom. European Urban and Regional
Studies 8, 28396.
Keating, M. 1998: The new regionalism in Western
Europe. Cheltenham: Elgar.
2001: Rethinking the region. Culture, insti-
tutions and economic development in
Catalonia and Galicia. European Urban and
Regional Studies 8, 21734.
Krasner. S.D. 2001: Problematic sovereignty. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Le Gals, P. and Lequesne, C., editors 1998:
Regions in Europe. London: Routledge.
Livingstone, D. 1995: The spaces of knowledge:
contributions towards a historical geography
of science. Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 13, 534.
MacLeod, G. 1998: In what sense a region? Place
hybridity, symbolic shape, and institutional
formation in (post-)modern Scotland. Political
Geography 17, 83363.
2001: New regionalism reconsidered: global-
ization and the remaking of political economic
space. International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 25, 80429.
MacLeod, G. and Jones, M. 2002: Renewing the
geography of regions. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 19, 66995.
Madanipour, A., Hull, A. and Healey, P., editors
2001: The governance of place. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Marston, S. 2000: The social construction of scale.
Progress in Human Geography 24, 21942.
Marston, S. and Smith, N. 2001: States, scales
and households: limits to scale thinking? A
response to Brenner. Progress in Human
Geography 25, 61519.
Massey, D. 1978: Regionalism: some current
issues. Capital and Class 6, 10626.
1995: The conceptualization of place. In Relph, E. 1996: Place. In Douglas, I., Huggett, R.
Massey, D. and Jess, P., editors, A place in the
world, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4585.
Massey, D., Allen, J., and Sarre, P., editors 1999:
Human geography today. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
May, J.A. 1970: Kants concept of geography and its
relation to recent geographical thought. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Minshull, R. 1967: Regional geography. Theory and
practice. London: Hutchinson.
Murphy, A. 1991: Regions as social constructs:
the gap between theory and practice Progress in
Human Geography 15, 2235.
Ohmae, K. 1995: The end of the nation-state: the rise
of regional economies. London: Free Press.
Olwig, K.F. and Hastrup, K., editors 1997: Siting
culture: the shifting anthropological object.
London: Routledge.
Paasi, A. 1991: Deconstructing regions: notes on
the scales of spatial life. Environment and
Planning A 23, 23954.
1996a: Regions as social and cultural
constructs: reflections on recent geographical
debates. In Idvall, M. and Salomonsson, A,
editors, Att skapa en region: om identitet och
territorium, Copenhagen: NordRefo, 90107.
1996b: Territories, boundaries and conscious-
ness. Chichester: John Wiley.
2001: Europe as a social process and
discourse: considerations of place, boundaries
and identity. European Urban and Regional
Studies 8, 728.
2002: Bounded spaces in the mobile world:
deconstructing regional identity. Tijdschrift
voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93, 13748.
2003: Boundaries in a globalizing world. In
Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. and Thrift,
N., editors, Handbook of cultural geography,
London: Sage, in press.
Pierre, J., editor 2000: Debating governance.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pratt, G. 1999: Geographies of identity and
difference: marking boundaries. In Massey, D.,
Allen, J. and Sarre, P., editors, Human geography
today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 15167.
Pred, A. 1984: Place as historically contingent
process: structuration and the time-geography
of becoming places. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 74, 27997.
Radcliffe, S. and Westwood, S. 1996: Remaking
the nation: place, identity and politics in Latin
America. London: Routledge.
and Robinson, M., editors, Companion encyclo-
pedia of geography: the environment and
humankind, London: Routledge, 90622.
Sack, R.D. 1997: Homo geographicus. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sayer, A. 1989: The new regional geography and
problems of narrative. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 7, 25376.
Scott, A.J. 1998: Regions and the world economy: The
coming shape of global production, competition and
political order. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, J. 1995: The construction of social reality.
New York: Free Press.

Shapiro, M.J. 1999: Triumphalist geographies. In
Featherstone, M. and Lash, S., editors, Spaces of
culture, London: Sage, 15974.
Sibley, D. 1995: Geographies of exclusion. London:
Routledge.
Smith, J.M. 1996: Ramifications of region and
senses of place. In Earville, C., Mathewson, K.
and Kenzer, M.S., editors, Concepts in human
geography, London: Rowman and Littlefield,
189211.
Storper, M. 1997: The regional world: territorial
development in a global economy. New York:
Guilford Press.
Swyngedouw, E. 1997: Neither global nor local:
glocalization and the politics of scale. In Cox,
K.R., editor, Spaces of globalization: reasserting the
power of the local, New York: Guilford Press,
13766.
Taylor, P.J. 1991: A theory and practice of regions:
the case of Europes. Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space 9, 18395.
1994: The state as container: territoriality in
the modern world-system. Progress in Human
Geography 18, 15162.
1999: Places, spaces and Macys: place-space
tensions in the political geographies of
modernities. Progress in Human Geography 23,
726.
Terlouw, K. 2001: Regions in geography and
the regional geography of semiperipheral
Anssi Paasi 811
development. Tijdschrift voor Economische en
Sociale Geografie 92, 7687.
Thrift, N. 1983: On the determination of social
action in space and time. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 1, 2357.
1994: Taking aim at the heart of region. In
Gregory, D., Martin, R. and Smith, G., editors,
Human geography: society, space and social science,
London: Macmillan, 20031.
1998: Towards a new New Regional
Geography. Berichte zur deutchsen Landeskunde
72, Heft 1, 3746.
1999: Steps to an ecology of place. In Massey,
D., Allen, J. and Sarre, P., editors, Human
geography today, Cambridge: Polity Press,
295322.
Tomaney, J. and Ward, N., editors 2001: A region
in transition. North east England at the
millennium. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Tuan, Y.-F. 1975: Place: an experiential per-
spective. Geographical Review 65, 15165.
Werlen, B. 1997: Sozialgeographie alltglicher
Regionalisierungen. Band 2: Globalizierung,
Region und Regionalisierung. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag.
Wollersheim, H-W ., Tzscaschel, S., and
Middell, M., editors 1998: Region und
Identifikation. Leipziger Studien zur Erforschung
von Regionbezogenen Identifikationprozessen,
Band 1, Leipzig: Leipziger Universittsverlag.