Regional Synthesis

• A region is a part of the earth’s surface that stands apart from its surroundings in terms of chosen criteria. Regional geography studies such parts as integrated wholes.
• Regional synthesis is the method that brings together the physical, economic, social and political elements of an area. It shows how they combine to give the area its distinct character.
  • It is the working method of areal differentiation. Areal differentiation asks how places differ; regional synthesis shows how to study a place so that the differences become intelligible.
• The regional idea is among the oldest in geography. It dominated the discipline until the 1950s, was eclipsed by spatial science, and returned from the 1980s in a new, theory-informed form.

The Regional Concept in History

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Meaning of Region

• Etymology: “region” comes from the Latin regio, from regere, “to rule or direct”. It first meant an area under one administration.
• No single definition: a survey of American regionalism in the late 1930s by Howard Odum and Harry Moore gathered about 40 definitions. Each major geographer framed the region in his own way.

• The modern view: a region is not given by nature. It is an intellectual construct, created by selecting the features relevant to a problem and ignoring the rest.
  • Its homogeneity holds only for the criteria chosen. A rice region can be heterogeneous in language, and a linguistic region can be heterogeneous in relief.

From Classical Description to Natural Regions

• Classical period:
  • Herodotus (5th century BCE) described the known world in three parts: Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa).
  • Strabo (Geographica, 17 books) wrote a human-centred description of the regions of the Roman world, meant for statesmen and commanders.
  • Ptolemy separated chorography, the description of small regions, from the mapping of the whole earth.
  • Regional knowledge served administration, trade and war.
• Renaissance and colonial era: voyages and empires produced regional accounts, atlases and “universal geographies” of newly known lands. These recorded their resources, peoples and routes.
  • Geographical societies, such as the Royal Geographical Society (1830), tied regional description to trade and empire.
• The search for natural regions:
  • Philippe Buache (1700–1773) divided the earth into river basins separated by supposedly continuous mountain chains.
  • Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–1799) urged that such natural regions replace political units as the frame of geographical description.
  • The mountain-network theory proved false, but Carl Ritter kept the natural region as the basic unit of regional geography.
• Richthofen and Hettner made the study of areas the centre of the discipline. Hettner judged that no single principle can divide the world; regional division has to combine several grounds, weighted differently in different places.

Landschaft, Pays and Cultural Landscape

• German Landschaft carried two meanings: the visual scene and a tract of land with a uniform aspect. Mixing the two let some geographers treat regions as concrete objects.
  • Albrecht Penck limited the Landschaft to what is visible, which included human works but not people themselves.
  • Otto Schlüter made people a major landscape element and separated the natural from the cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft).
  • Siegfried Passarge excluded people and animals altogether and built regions mainly on vegetation and landforms.
• French pays: these were small regions shaped by centuries of close interplay between a community and its milieu, the areal expression of a genre de vie in the French school.
  • For Vidal, human occupance could create homogeneity even where nature was not uniform.
• Carl Ortwin Sauer’s “The Morphology of Landscape” (1925) put it this way: “culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.”
  • In American usage, “landscape” came to be used much like “region”.
• Region as organism: Ritter, Vidal, Sauer, Vernor Finch and Glenn Trewartha all likened regions to organisms.
  • Hartshorne rejected the analogy: a region can be divided into parts, has no common growth and “is acted upon; of itself it never reacts”.

Natural Regions and Their Critique

• Andrew John Herbertson’s “The Major Natural Regions” (1905) divided the world into generic regions, based mainly on climate, with relief and vegetation.
  • Monsoon lands, Mediterranean lands and tundra recur on several continents as specimens of one type.
  • The scheme became a staple of school geography.
  • Its users assumed each natural region produced a definite way of life. This gave regional geography a deterministic tilt.
• J. F. Unstead (1916, 1933) built regions synthetically from the bottom up. The smallest unit was the stow, stows grouped into tracts (close to the pays), and tracts into minor and major regions.
  • Herbertson’s scheme, by contrast, worked analytically, dividing the world downwards.
• The critique of “natural” regions:
  • Climate, relief, soils and location vary largely independently of one another, so no division fits all of them.
  • Choosing which factor is decisive is a subjective judgement. The regions are therefore constructs of the geographer, not divisions found in nature.

Rise, Eclipse and Return of Regional Geography

• High point:
  • Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (1939) made regional study the highest form of geography.
  • The Whittlesey Committee of the Association of American Geographers (“The Regional Concept and the Regional Method”, 1954) codified regional method.
  • George Chabot called regional geography “the centre around which everything converges”.
• Attack:
  • George H. T. Kimble (“The Inadequacy of the Regional Concept”, 1951) called the region an 18th-century idea. He warned that regional geographers might be trying to “put boundaries that do not exist around areas that do not matter”.
  • Fred K. Schaefer (1953) branded the regional approach exceptionalist, which opened the Hartshorne–Schaefer debate.
  • Industrialisation weakened the local, rural self-sufficiency on which the Vidalian method rested (E. A. Wrigley, 1965).
• Regionalisation as classification:
  • David Grigg’s “The Logic of Regional Systems” (1965) treated regionalisation as a form of scientific classification.
  • William Bunge’s reply (1966), that locations are comparable, not unique, is often taken as the end of the idiographic position.
• Regional science: Walter Isard’s Regional Science Association (1954) built theory about regional economies. Regional geography kept its descriptive, educational role.
  • Regional science is problem-oriented, forward-looking and precise. Regional geography aims at balanced coverage and appeals to wonder and concern about other places and peoples.
• Defence and return:
  • J. H. Paterson (1974) answered that “all places are manifestly not the same place”.
  • The region came back from the 1980s as a social construct shaped by wider processes, the new regional geography.

Region: Attributes, Types and Principles

Attributes of a Region

• Areal extent: every region covers an area with some homogeneity of physical or cultural traits, for example the Thar Desert, Bundelkhand or the Sahara.
• Location: regions have absolute and relative location, often fixed in their names, such as South Asia, South-East Asia and the Middle East.
• Boundaries: boundaries may be sharp, like administrative lines, or transitional, like the Himalayan foothills or the margins of a language area.
  • “Nature abhors lines”, yet regions need them. Transition zones only move the problem, since they too must be bounded.
• Homogeneity or function: unity may come from sameness (formal regions) or from linkages to a centre (functional regions).
• Hierarchy: regions nest inside larger regions.
  • The Indo-Gangetic Plain is a first-order region. It contains the Upper, Middle and Lower Ganga Plains as second-order regions.
• Change: regions are dynamic. Functional regions such as NCR expand, and cultural and political regions are redrawn.

Types of Region

• Formal (uniform) regions: homogeneous throughout in the chosen criteria.
  • Physical: landform regions, such as the Deccan Plateau and the Brahmaputra Valley; climatic regions, such as the monsoon lands.
  • Cultural: linguistic, religious and ethnic regions, the cultural regions of the world and of India.
  • Political: the nation-state is the most sharply bounded formal region. Its borders change with wars and treaties; the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) ended the division of Germany.
  • Economic and resource: regions of economic activities such as agricultural belts; the Jharia coalfield; the iron-ore belt of Odisha and Jharkhand; industrial regions such as the Hugli belt.
  • Compage: Derwent Whittlesey’s term (1956) for a uniform region in which all features, physical, biotic and social, are tied to human occupance.
• Functional (nodal) regions: areas tied to one or more nodes by flows of people, goods, services and information.
  • They are defined by measuring movement, such as commuting, newspaper circulation or market service areas.
  • Their boundaries mark where one centre’s pull gives way to another’s.
  • Examples: Delhi NCR’s milk-, vegetable- and commuter-shed; the Mumbai Metropolitan Region; Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis (1961), the urban chain from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia.
  • Robert E. Dickinson’s City Region and Regionalism (1947) and Allen K. Philbrick (1957) built on Christaller’s central places to make the functional region central.
• Planning regions: areas delimited for development and administration. They usually combine formal and functional logic.
  • Indian examples: the Damodar Valley Corporation (1948), a river-basin region; the NCR Planning Board (1985); the North Eastern Council (1971); the Planning Commission’s 15 agro-climatic regions (1989).
• Perceptual (vernacular) regions: regions that exist in people’s mental maps, with fuzzy edges and strong identity.
  • “Purvanchal”, “the North-East” and “Bundelkhand” are perceived as wholes, though no single criterion defines them. They are studied through the mental maps of behavioural geography.
• Generic and specific regions: a Geographical Association committee (1937) made this distinction.
  • Generic regions are types that recur wherever the defining traits recur; “Mediterranean” lands, for example, occur on several continents.
  • Specific regions are unique places, such as the Ganga Plain or the Alps, studied in their actual location.

Principles of Regionalisation

• Regionalisation is classification. Grouping places upward by similarity is synthetic and inductive; dividing a whole downward is analytical and deductive.
  • Bunge (1962) wrote that geographers had “independently rediscovered the entire logic of classification systems”.
• Grigg’s principles (1965) set out how regions should be drawn:
  • Regions are drawn for a specific purpose; one scheme rarely serves two purposes equally well.
  • Criteria should be properties of the thing classified. Farming regions should rest on farming systems, not on the soils and climate thought to cause them.
  • The division must be exhaustive and mutually exclusive: every part belongs to one region only.
  • Each level uses one principle, and the most important criterion comes at the highest level.
  • Schemes are not absolute. They must be revised as knowledge grows; inherited schemes such as Herbertson’s need constant review.

Regional Synthesis

Meaning

• Synthesis means a complex whole made of many parts unified. Regional synthesis is the integrated analysis of all relevant phenomena in a region, physio-cultural, socio-economic and geopolitical, to give a true picture of the region.
  • It grew within the areal-differentiation tradition. Hartshorne called geography an integrating science, and regional synthesis is the method that does the integrating.
• Example: no single variable defines a backward area. Income per head, literacy, mortality, health facilities and infrastructure must be combined into one picture.
  • Likewise, language, ethnicity, customs, ritual and religion together define a cultural region.
• The method needs topical specialists. Systematic studies supply the materials, and regional synthesis assembles them. This is why the two approaches are complementary rather than opposed.

Fenneman’s Circumference of Geography (1919)

• Nevin M. Fenneman’s presidential address to the Association of American Geographers, “The Circumference of Geography” (1919), drew geography as a circle overlapped by the sister sciences.
  • Each overlap is a systematic branch that geography shares with another science: geomorphology with geology, climatology with meteorology, biogeography with botany and zoology, economic geography with economics, and so on.
  • The central core, belonging to no other science, is regional geography: the study of how all these elements combine in particular areas.
• The lesson: geography’s distinctive task is not any single class of phenomena but their integration in place. Regional synthesis is that task.
  • The region is where the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere meet human activity. Synthesis reads them together; each sister science reads only one.
  • Even systematic schemes depend on such synthesis. Wladimir Köppen drew his climatic boundaries partly from vegetation limits, and soil classes are tied to moisture and aridity.

Berry’s Geographical Matrix (1964)

• Brian J. L. Berry’s “Approaches to Regional Analysis: A Synthesis” (1964) arranged geographical data as a matrix:
  • rows are attributes, such as temperature, rainfall, density or literacy;
  • columns are places, such as Delhi, Gurugram, Meerut or Mathura;
  • each cell is a geographic fact: one attribute at one place;
  • time adds a third dimension, as a stack of matrix slices.
• Ten modes of analysis:
  1. Arrangement within a row, the spatial distribution of one attribute.
  2. Arrangement within a column, the character of one place.
  3. Comparison of rows, or spatial association between attributes.
  4. Comparison of columns, or areal differentiation between places.
  5. Study of a submatrix (box), the regional study of selected places and attributes.
  6. A row through time: changing spatial distribution.
  7. A column through time: sequent occupance, the changing character of a place.
  8. Rows compared through time: changing spatial association.
  9. Columns compared through time: changing areal differentiation.
  10. A submatrix through time, which may combine all the above.
• Significance: the matrix shows that systematic (row-wise) and regional (column-wise) geography read the same data in different directions. Regional synthesis is the submatrix approach, with time added.

The Method in Practice

• Two kinds of unity: synthesis looks for vertical relations within a region, between rock, soil, climate, crops and people. It also looks for horizontal relations between regions: flows, trade and influence.
  • The old regional monograph stressed the first; functional and new regional approaches stress the second.
• The classical outline: the German regional monograph, as Hettner shaped it, ran in a cause-and-effect sequence.
  • It moved from location, geology, relief and climate to resources, population, settlement, economy, transport and political divisions.
  • Through Hartshorne it became the standard outline in the English-speaking world. Critics called it a catalogue that tied every human feature back to physical “causes”.
• Five ways of studying regions: H. Fochler-Hauke (1959) distinguished:
  • landscape morphology, the form and structure of the visible landscape;
  • landscape ecology, the functional interplay within a region and with its centres;
  • landscape chronology, the development of a region over time;
  • regionalisation, the delimitation of regions;
  • landscape classification, the grouping of regions into types.
• Steps of regional synthesis:
  1. Define the purpose, for example agricultural planning, backwardness or cultural identity.
  2. Select criteria suited to that purpose.
  3. Collect and map data from census, surveys, remote sensing and field work.
  4. Integrate the layers through composite indices, factor or cluster analysis, or overlay in GIS.
  5. Delimit regions and their boundaries, and arrange them in a hierarchy.
  6. Interpret the interrelations that give each region its character, and compare it with others.
• Example: the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Alluvial soils, gentle slope, monsoon rainfall, perennial Himalayan rivers, canal irrigation, rice–wheat farming, dense rural settlement and a long cultural history combine into one regional personality.
  • Synthesis also shows the internal gradients from the Upper to the Lower Plain: rising rainfall, a shift from wheat towards rice and jute, and higher densities.
• Indian regional studies:
  • O. H. K. Spate’s India and Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography (1954; later editions with A. T. A. Learmonth) is the classic regional synthesis of the subcontinent.
  • R. L. Singh’s edited India: A Regional Geography (1971) divided India into a hierarchy of regions for systematic description.
  • Planning schemes, such as the 15 agro-climatic regions, carry the method into policy.

Importance Today

• Climate change: warming and rainfall change are regionally uneven. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2021) assesses projections for reference regions.
  • Adaptation plans in India are drawn at the state and district level.
• Regional disparity: composite regionalisation identifies lagging areas for targeted programmes, such as NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts Programme (2018).
• Planning and governance: river basins, metropolitan regions, agro-climatic zones and disaster-risk zones all need multi-factor synthesis.
• Federal governance: India’s states were largely reorganised on linguistic regions under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956. Later states, from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand (2000) to Telangana (2014), show that regional identity and regional disparity still shape political maps.
• Change over time: through sequent occupance (Derwent Whittlesey, 1929), regional synthesis traces how successive cultures reshape one area.
• Technology: GIS, remote sensing and big data make multi-layer synthesis faster and more precise than the old map overlays.
• Integration of knowledge: at a time of narrow specialisation, regional synthesis keeps physical and human geography together.

Limitations

• Subjectivity: the choice and weighting of criteria are subjective.
• Fixed boundaries: boundaries freeze what is in fact gradual and changing.
• Description over explanation: traditional synthesis tended to describe without explaining. It also treated regions as closed, neglecting external links and global processes.
• Scale of the task: the range of knowledge needed for a full synthesis is beyond any one scholar, so teamwork and area-studies collaboration are needed.
• Response: these limits led to the reformulation of the region as an open, socially produced unit in the new regional geography.