Progress in Human Geography 28,2 (2004) pp. 141-144 Viewpoint

Looking for the nature of the contemporary region The meaning and understanding of the concept of region has been changing along with the ways in which human geographers understand and describe the world. The tight connection between the changing notions of region and methodological turns in the whole discipline originate from the key role of the concept of region in geographical studies. If we look at the classical definitions of region and geography, we find them thoroughly overlapping. Whittlesey (1954), for example, identifies region as a differentiated segment of earth-space with geography as the study of areal differentiation. Thus, to him, regional studies constitute the core of theoretical and empirical research in geography. The chorological tradition and the works of the Vidal de la Blache school clarified and classified the differentiated world, starting with its physical features and iden-tifying the environmentally homogeneous units before studying their inner specific genres de vie. Regional science erased the physical boundaries, claiming that onl