Twenty-five years ago a book was published with the title Rethinking the Region. The authors were John Allen, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane, who drew as illustration of their argument, on the United Kingdom’s Southeast. Hugely stimulating, it got a very considerable number of citations – well over a thousand – though one would like to know what themes or aspects were being cited. Are people carrying out regional studies drawing on the framework set out there? If so, for what purpose? Curiously there was only one review. The title appears in the bibliography of the latest version of the Blackwell Dictionary of Human Geography, but I struggled to find where it was referenced; certainly not in the articles on ‘Region’ and ‘Regional geography.’
The intervention was a timely one. Regional geography or, more hopefully, the geography of regions, has long been neglected. One suspects that that is because of its stubbornly descriptive character. Where there was an attempt at explanation, it tended to follow a grimly environmental determinist course: so ‘the physical framework’, ‘the economy’, ‘transport’, and then ‘settlement patterns.’ It then got thoroughly occluded with the rise of spatial-quantitative geography, and then a human geography aware of social theory (Cox 2014: Chapters 1-4.) But as Doreen Massey pointed out about conventional views of the region, ‘one can do more with the unique than contemplate it’ (1983: 75.)
Her approach, along with John Allen and Allan Cochrane, was to focus on regions as aspects of national imaginaries; and how those imaginaries reflected changing patterns of uneven development and the production relations subtending them. Conceptions of regions are constructed in relation to one another, and drawing on fields of contrast. But in that drawing, a hegemonic view is at work. In the British case, it comes in particular from London: a major site of the national media, and focus of national attention in virtue of the concentration of national institutions and practices – museums, galleries, royal display, major international as well as national sporting events. It is a view in which denizens of the surrounding Home Counties have always been happy to bask. This contrasting with ‘the rest of the country’ and in particular the industrial ‘North’ has long been the case. In his Britain and the British Seas, Mackinder contrasted Metropolitan England, centered on London, with Industrial England, and the division has been a common trope in the English novel.
What Allen, Massey and Cochrane wish to signify, though, is that with the neo-liberal moment, a region wider than London and the Home Counties emerged, and one in which London lost some of its regional hegemony. There were new growth poles like Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Reading, and even Bristol. The Southeast had extended further north and to the west from London. This was an area that, relative to the rest of the United Kingdom, stood out in terms of not just its prosperity, but also its rate of economic growth. This economic growth, they argued could be traced to three major dynamics. First, the growth of financial services, mainly in London, but also in places like Croydon, where back-office functions were performed; this was subsequent to the deregulation of financial services in the 1980s. Second, there was hitech in computer services, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and research and development functions, including those of the state. And then consumption, facilitated by a surge in the credit card debt; debt taken on, in particular, by those earning the higher incomes from finance and hitech and their respective filières. This sense of being different from the rest of the country, has then been enhanced by more global connections. Hence the claim that “As part of an imaginary regional geography of the United Kingdom, the south east holds pole position in a discourse of dominance.” (p.10; my emphasis.)
An important feature of their approach is to dispense with the notion of regions as areas, continuous, without holes, and with sharp boundaries. Rather they are to be thought of “in terms of social relations stretched over space” and as “a complex and unbounded lattice of articulations with internal relations of power and inequality and punctured by structured exclusions” (p.65.) Regarding ‘structured exclusions’, they are keen to emphasize the Medway towns of Chatham, Gillingham and Rochester which, along with the adjacent Isle of Thanet, form something of a depressed area relative to the rest of the Southeast, but this also applies to some of the coastal towns along the Essex coast. Places get defined through relations, both those within and those without.
This made me think of old definitions of regions as homogeneous: as bringing together the similar, which indeed what Allen et al. do by demonstrating how the Southeast is defined as a growth region: places that share an economic growth not found elsewhere in the United Kingdom. But they then go beyond this by showing how this is a result of equally distinct socio-spatial relations rooted in their three growth dynamics; in short, light years ahead of the way classical regional geography tried to explain in terms of differences in geology and climate and the human adaptations to them.
This is an approach that carries promise in applications other than to the United Kingdom’s Southeast. One immediately thinks of talk in the US about a bi-coastal economy focused on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts but with particular emphasis on the Northeast and California. These are then separated by the pejorative ‘flyover’ country. This goes back to the 1980s, but has acquired additional resonance with the Trump phenomenon where his strength was concentrated in the middle of the country and in the southeast: mainly the so-called ‘rustbelt’, places ‘left behind’ with the closure of small town branch plants, but also picking up on the stubborn racism of the South. In short, a coming together of different forces and conditions of the sort emphasized by Allen, Massey and Cochrane, that would then make it easier for the media elites of the coasts to define the remainder with derision.
More generally, and aside from the emphasis on regional identities within a national imaginary, Rethinking the Region lays down three important ground rules for how we might go about it. The first is, indeed, the national framing; how regions get defined with respect to their location within the country as a whole, as in ‘the Southeast’ or ‘the North.’ This is something that is occurring in France. Despite official designations of administrative regions, there are tendencies to talk about ‘the Northeast’, ‘the West’, and the ‘Southwest.’ This reflects a more general part/whole understanding of regions as in Scotland’s ‘Central Belt’ or the divisions within administrative areas that emerge without official sanction: so North/South/Mid-Warwickshire; or Central/Northeast/Southwest Ohio. This, however, is not much more than a lay geography through which people try to understand and then communicate locations, as in ‘I have to go up to Bilston today. It’s in the West Midlands, you know.’
This is descriptive. But the part/whole way of thinking is reinforced by the claim that regions in the contemporary world are formed in relation to one another; so Southeast England as holding ‘pole position in a discourse of dominance’ (p.10; my emphasis.); or, indeed ‘the bi-coastal economy.’ These are based on fields of contrast within a larger entity. The contrast is with earlier, more self-sufficient conceptions like ‘East Anglia,’ ‘Alsace-Lorraine’, ‘Provence’ or in the US, ‘Little Egypt’ and ‘Genesee.’
Third, and finally, Rethinking the Region puts squarely in the picture the importance of change in the national political economy. The Southeast is defined as a ‘neo-liberal region.’ I am not sure that they got it right since not everything that they draw on to define the region falls comfortably in that slot; how hitech is neo-liberal is a bit baffling. But the general point drawn seems important. Change in the national economy induces change in patterns of uneven development and so in how we come to describe and understand a country’s regional geography. So countries matter, though I would add that they matter more generally in terms of inherited conditions of the social process: state structures, historical geographies of industrial development and resources.
There are some limits to the agenda laid out by Rethinking the Region, not least the focus on imaginaries and regional identities. Might there be other ways of going about it? This question merits a second blog.
REFERENCES
Cox K R (2014) The Making of Human Geography. New York: Guilford.
Massey D (1983) Industrial restructuring as class restructuring: Production decentralization and local uniqueness. Regional Studies, 17:2, 73-89.
Unfashionable Geographies 