‘Fuck the Context!’: Critical Regional Discourse in the Context of Foresight Studies

This article is an attempt at a critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the idea of the region. The author reviews and summarizes critical views of the idea in the discourses of architecture (Frampton, Koolhaas, Ibelings), art history (DaCosta, Kauffman, Piotrowski), and social anthropology (Gupta, Ferguson, Malkki, Bhabha). He then focuses on the example of the contemporary discourse on power, in which the concept of ‘region’ still functions in the form of implicit premises about the naturalness of differences and territorial and cultural divisions. The example is analyzed through the findings of the research project ‘Regional Foresight for Wielkopolska’ (2009–2011). The author’s conclusion points to the great dissonance between the discourse of modern humanities and the applied discourse of contemporary policy (including regional policy)