Concept of Region in Geography

• A region is a part of the earth’s surface that is distinct from its surroundings in terms of chosen criteria and has some internal unity, either of similarity or of interaction.
• It is one of geography’s oldest and most contested ideas. It serves at once as a unit of analysis, a tool of planning and a frame of identity; some geographers have called geography itself the science of regions.
• The concept has moved from natural regions given by nature, through regions as mental constructs chosen for a purpose, to regions as systems of flows and as social constructs that people make and remake.
• Regional planning rests on it: every plan needs a bounded territory whose problems, resources and people can be handled together.

Meaning and Definitions

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Meaning of Region

• The word comes from the Latin regio (from regere, to rule or direct). It first meant a direction, a boundary line or a district under one authority.
  • In everyday use, a region is simply a large tract of land. In geography the term is precise: an area differentiated from other areas by specified criteria.
• Regions may rest on physical characteristics (relief, climate, soil), human characteristics (language, economy, administration) or the interaction of people and environment (agricultural and resource regions).
• Regional geography studies what is unique about places: their culture, economy, topography, climate, politics and environment, including their flora and fauna.
• Most geographical regions have imprecise and shifting boundaries. Only legal regions, such as States, districts and national territories, have boundaries fixed in law.
• Scale is flexible: a village watershed, a river valley, the Indo-Gangetic Plain and South Asia can each be called a region. This flexibility is both the strength and the difficulty of the concept.

Two Dimensions of the Region Concept

• For most geographers the region is an objective reality defined in terms of space. The modern view adds that its boundaries come from the criteria the observer chooses, so it is also an intellectual construct.

Definitions by Major Geographers

• There has never been a single agreed definition. In the late 1930s Howard W. Odum and Harry E. Moore (American Regionalism, 1938) collected some 40 definitions of the region (often quoted as 41).

• Why geographers use regions:
  • The earth’s surface holds more variety than any mind can take in. Regions organise and simplify it into units that can be compared, described and managed.
  • Biologists classify organisms into groups with shared traits for the same reason. A region is a class of places, made by the geographer but designed so that the information it carries is useful.

Is the Region Real or Constructed?

• Two positions run through the debate:
  • Realist view: regions exist in nature or society and the geographer discovers them. Natural regions, the pays and the Hartshornean region as a distinctive area lean this way.
  • Constructivist (nominalist) view: regions are made by the observer for a purpose. The same land is a rice region, a Bengali-speaking region and a city region at once, each with its own edge.
• The working consensus combines them: the phenomena are real, but which phenomena are chosen, and where a line is drawn across a gradient, are decisions. A region is therefore objective in content and subjective in boundary.
• This is why the region is contested. A boundary fixes a claim about which places belong together, and claims shape funds, identity and administration.

The Range of Regions

• Regions are named for their scale or what unites them: global, continental and geographical regions; natural, physiographic, palaeogeographic, climatic, hydrological and natural-resource regions; agricultural, industrial, tourism and economic regions; cultural, socio-cultural, linguistic, religious and historical regions; political, administrative, local administrative and military regions; functional, city and planning regions; and informal or traditional regions such as Mithila or Bundelkhand.
• They are grouped into formal, functional, vernacular and planning regions, with many sub-types. This classification is the subject of types of regions.

Region, Area, Zone and Territory

• Every region is an area, but not every area is a region. A zone may be part of a region (the core zone of a city region) or cut across several regions (the Himalayan seismic belt).

Evolution of the Regional Concept

Natural Regions and the Classical Phase

• Regional description is ancient: Strabo’s Geographica and the chorography of Ptolemy described the parts of the known world for administrators and traders. Until the 18th century, regional writing sought curiosities and inventories of places rather than theory.
• In the 18th century writers such as Philippe Buache and Johann Christoph Gatterer proposed natural regions bounded by river basins and mountain chains in place of political units.
• The German school’s idea of Landschaft (region or landscape, mid-19th century) treated each area as a distinctive combination of natural and cultural features.
• Systematic definition came in the early 20th century from three schools:
  • Alfred Hettner in Germany, who made the study of areas (chorology) the core of geography and judged that regional division must combine several criteria.
  • Paul Vidal de la Blache in France, whose pays were small regions shaped by centuries of interplay between a community and its milieu, the natural setting.
  • Andrew John Herbertson in Britain, whose The Major Natural Regions (1905) gave the first systematic world scheme.
• Herbertson’s natural regions:
  • He divided the world into natural regions much as biologists classify organisms, an “organic” view of regionalisation.
  • His criteria, in order: configuration (relief and structure), climate (temperature and rainfall), vegetation, and population density.
  • His scheme is usually cited as 15 major natural regions. Each type, such as monsoon lands or Mediterranean lands, recurs on several continents.
  • His scheme worked analytically, dividing the world downward. J. F. Unstead (1916, 1933) built regions synthetically upward: the smallest unit, the stow, grouped into tracts, and tracts into minor and major regions.
• Vidal’s pays, such as the Beauce and the Brie around Paris, showed the opposite logic: human occupance could create homogeneity even where nature was not uniform.
• Similar physical regionalisations followed, many by Russian geographers. Setting natural regions was then seen as the necessary step towards solving the problems of geography.
• Users assumed each natural region produced a definite way of life. The natural region became a fact of nature with a deterministic tilt: productive activity was thought to follow climate, relief and soil.

Areal Differentiation and Regional Synthesis

• Between the two World Wars geography was criticised as descriptive and determinist. It recast itself as the study of why places differ, the idea of areal differentiation.
• Carl Ortwin Sauer and the Berkeley school studied cultural landscapes as regions shaped by human groups.
• Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (1939), drawing on Hettner, defined geography as the accurate, orderly and rational description of the variable character of the earth’s surface. Regional study became the highest form of the discipline, and regions were treated as unique composites, not classifiable under general laws.
• The Whittlesey Committee of the Association of American Geographers (1954) codified regional method. The region was now an intellectual concept, not an object found in nature.
• Regional synthesis became the working method: integrating physical, economic and cultural elements to show how they combine in one area.

Quantitative Critique and Functional Regions

• The economic region dominated regional research from the 1930s to the 1970s. Location theory and planning needed regions defined by production, trade and flows.
• Regional geography was popular for a short time during and after the Second World War, then attacked as too descriptive and not quantitative enough, and for knowledge tied to particular regions.
• Gravity models and Reilly’s law were used to mark spheres of urban influence, with economists and planners joining geographers.
• George H. T. Kimble (“The Inadequacy of the Regional Concept”, 1951) called the region an 18th-century idea; Fred K. Schaefer (1953) branded regional geography exceptionalist, opening the Hartshorne–Schaefer debate.
• The quantitative revolution recast the region:
  • David Grigg (1965) treated regionalisation as a form of classification with logical rules.
  • Functional (nodal) regions defined by flows to a centre joined formal regions defined by similarity.
  • Brian J. L. Berry (1968) proposed a general field theory that derives both formal and functional regions from one matrix of places, attributes and interactions.

Perceptual, Radical and New Regional Geography

• The humanistic approach turned to perceived or vernacular regions, the regions people carry in their minds and speech.
• Radical geographers read regions as products of uneven development and the spatial division of labour: core and periphery, enclave and hinterland.
• New regional geography (1980s onwards) treats regions as social constructs that form, change and fade:
  • Anssi Paasi (1986) traced the institutionalisation of regions in four stages: a territorial shape, a symbolic shape (name and symbols), institutions, and a settled place in the regional system and in people’s consciousness.
  • Regions are seen as open and relational, tied to flows that reach far beyond their boundaries.
• For about four decades regional geography has no longer looked central to most geographers, and some remain sharply critical of the regional idea. Even so, the concept is in renewal rather than decline. The interest in place, territory, regional identity and city-regions keeps it central to geography and planning.

Nature and Characteristics of a Region

Characteristics

• Location: every region occupies a definite location on the earth, small like a village cluster or vast like Monsoon Asia.
  • It is identified by relative or absolute location and usually carries a name that places it among other areas: South-East Asia, the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
• Areal extent: a region has spatial extent and boundaries, though these may be sharp or transitional.
  • Rajasthan has a legal boundary. The Hindi belt has gradual, overlapping edges.
• Homogeneity within: a region shows internal similarity in one or more elements, physical, cultural, economic or functional.
  • Desert region: aridity. Rice region: a common crop system. Tribal region: socio-cultural traits. Industrial region: concentration of manufacturing.
• Heterogeneity outside: it differs from neighbouring areas in the chosen criteria.
  • The Western Ghats stand apart from the Deccan Plateau in relief, rainfall, vegetation and biodiversity.
• Unity or cohesion: in formal regions unity comes from similarity; in functional regions it comes from interaction and linkage with a node.
• Transitional boundaries: the character of a region fades towards its edges into a zone of transition, rarely a line.
• Dynamic nature: regions change over time.
  • The Damodar Valley moved from a mineral and heavy-industry region to a more diversified economy; a city region widens as transport improves.
• Hierarchy: regions nest within one another at different scales. A first-order region holds second-order sub-regions, as the Lower Ganga Plain lies within the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
  • Macro: South Asia, Peninsular India. Meso: Deccan Plateau, Indo-Gangetic Plain. Micro: Chota Nagpur Plateau, Malwa Plateau. Micro-minor: a watershed, block or village cluster.
• Purposive: a region is delineated for a purpose. Climatic, agricultural, cultural and planning regions of the same area have different boundaries.
• Problem-bound and resource-based: a homogeneous region tends to share common problems, and a planning region needs a resource base it can use.

Anatomy of a Region: Node, Zone and Transitional Boundary

• Geographers studying the internal structure of regions, especially functional regions, recognise three nested parts. In short, region = node + zone + transitional boundary. Together these make up the area of the region, measured against a scale.
• Homogeneity is greatest towards the node, and heterogeneity rises outward.

• The intensity of the defining phenomenon falls from node to boundary. Where two regions meet, their transitional zones overlap, as along the edge of the semi-arid and sub-humid zones or between two city regions.
• In planning, the node is where services and investment are concentrated, the zone is the area served, and the transitional belt is where competing centres divide their influence.

Region as a System

• A region behaves as an open system: a set of interdependent parts, people, settlements, land, resources and institutions, linked by flows.
  • Inputs enter from outside: capital, migrants, technology, energy, information.
  • Processes inside transform them: production, exchange, settlement growth.
  • Outputs leave: goods, remittances, waste, out-migrants.
  • Feedback adjusts the system: success attracts more inputs, decline drives them away.
• Subsystems nest within it: the settlement system, the transport network, the agricultural system and the ecosystem.
• Because regions are open, a change elsewhere (a new port, a price shock, a policy) propagates into them. Planning must work with these links, not only within the boundary.
• Example: the Mumbai Metropolitan Region draws in migrants, capital and food from across India; transforms them through finance, port trade and manufacturing; and sends out goods, services and remittances. Congestion and land prices act as negative feedback, pushing industry out to Bhiwandi, Pune and beyond.
• Systems thinking explains why regions are dynamic: as flows change, so do the extent and character of the region.

Whittlesey’s Compage

• Derwent Whittlesey introduced the term compage in “The Regional Concept and the Regional Method” (1954).
• A compage is a region that includes all the features of the physical, biotic and societal environment that are functionally associated with human occupance of the earth.
  • It is the most comprehensive kind of region. It goes beyond single-feature and multiple-feature regions to the total human–environment complex.
• Its features:
  • Holistic: relief, climate, soil, water, vegetation, settlement, economy and culture are studied together as one functional whole.
  • Human-centred: the elements are chosen because they bear on human occupance, not for their own sake.
  • Functional, not only formal: what binds it is the interrelation of elements, not mere uniformity.
  • Scale-free: compages can be identified from a small locality to a world realm.
• Examples:
  • Whittlesey’s own agricultural regions of the world (1936), built on crop–livestock association, intensity of land use, disposal of produce, equipment and buildings, are compage-type regions.
  • The wet-rice compage of the lower Ganga plain and delta: alluvium, monsoon rain, paddy, dense villages, fishing and a shared cultural calendar form one system.
• Significance: it showed that regional geography is not mere description but the study of functional relationships between human, physical and biotic environments, and that general principles emerge through particular cases.
• Critique: a compage is hard to delimit objectively, because the more elements included, the less their boundaries coincide.

Regional Consciousness and Identity

• People living in a region often share a sense of belonging: a common name, language, history and interest. This regional consciousness turns a mapped area into a lived place.
• It can strengthen planning, as people identify with their region’s development, or feed regionalism, demands for autonomy or statehood. India’s linguistic reorganisation of States (1956) and the creation of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand (2000) and Telangana (2014) followed such consciousness; its interplay with national unity is the theme of regional consciousness and national integration.

Significance of the Region in Geography

• Unit of study: the region is the frame within which physical and human elements are studied together, the meeting point of systematic and regional geography.
• Tool of comparison: regions of the same type (two deltas, two metropolitan regions) can be compared to find general patterns.
• Bridge between theory and place: models of location, diffusion and development are tested on real regions.
• Medium of teaching and synthesis: it turns scattered facts into an intelligible picture of a place.
• Basis of policy: governments allocate funds, fix jurisdictions and design programmes region by region.

The Regional Concept in Planning

• The region entered planning through Patrick Geddes, whose Cities in Evolution (1915) urged that every city be studied with its surrounding region: “survey before plan”.
• The Tennessee Valley Authority (1933) made a river basin a planning region that cut across State boundaries. India’s Damodar Valley Corporation (1948) followed its model.
• Planning uses each kind of region for a different task:
  • Formal regions identify problem areas with common conditions: drought-prone, hill, tribal and backward areas.
  • Functional regions organise service delivery and urban growth around nodes: metropolitan and city regions.
  • Planning regions combine the two into units with an administrative authority to act, from the State down to the district and block.
• Indian practice shows each use:
  • River-basin region: the Damodar Valley Corporation across Jharkhand and West Bengal.
  • Metropolitan region: the National Capital Region, set up under the NCR Planning Board Act, 1985. It now covers about 55,083 sq km: all of Delhi, 14 districts of Haryana, 8 of Uttar Pradesh and 2 of Rajasthan.
  • Problem regions: drought-prone, desert, hill and tribal areas, each with its own backward area or special area programme.
  • Nested planning regions: State, district, block and Gram Panchayat in multi-level planning, with the hierarchy of planning regions of India from macro to micro.
• The regional concept gives planning:
  • a spatial unit for diagnosing problems and potentials;
  • a means of reducing regional imbalance by targeting lagging areas;
  • a frame for integrating sectors, such as agriculture, industry, transport and environment, in one place;
  • a basis for people’s participation, since people identify with a region;
  • a scale for environmental management, as with watersheds and river basins;
  • a route to sustainable development, the goal towards which regionalisation now serves planning from the country down to a small natural, functional or vernacular unit.
• Two practical questions follow: which types of regions suit which purpose, and how their boundaries are drawn by the methods of regionalisation.
• Problems with the concept in practice:
  • No single correct boundary: boundaries drawn on one criterion rarely fit another.
  • Administrative compromise: districts and States are used because data and authority exist for them, not because they are true regions.
  • Change versus fixity: regions keep changing while plans fix them for years.
  • Scale dependence: a pattern visible at one scale disappears at another, so the choice of unit shapes the result.
  • Political pressure: inclusion in a region can bring funds or status, so boundaries are contested.