Regions, Spaces of Economic Practice and Diverse

Steps towards a new ontology of Europe’s regions Regions and territories in Europe have come to the forefront of thinking about Europe’s futures. Whether it is through discourses concerning a ‘Europe of the regions ’ or through the recent emphasis upon the significance of regional clusters as the basis of economic competitiveness (see Martin and Sunley [2003] for a critical review), regions are seen as key sites of new European identities and the ‘new economy’. However, what such renderings have often missed is a wider, emergent debate that has begun to problematize the ontological basis of spaces such as ‘the region ’ and ‘the city ’ (see, in particular, Allen et al., 1998; Ami