The region as a concept :traditional and constructivist view

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to assess and compare the various understandings of the concept of the region. The aim is to characterize the concept of a region as well as how its meaning has changed through geographical history, to mention the most important personalities and how they understood the concept of region. The article presents two different ways of looking at a region: 1) the region in the sense of traditional regional geography; 2) the region in the new regional geography (region understood as a social construct). The article then compares the two approaches and outlines both their advantages and their disadvantages. The first section presents a brief overview of how the understanding of the concept of region developed. The following part focuses on development of the concept of region as a social construct, especially in the context of the development of new regional geography, cultural turn and new regionalism. Finally, the article emphasizes the essential complementarity of the two approaches and briefly proposes a more complex scheme of analysis of a region.