1The notion of the region has a strange destiny. A key concept in the establishment of geography as a modern scientific discipline at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe, it has gradually been mobilised - and even appropriated - by other disciplines that enriched the concept, sometimes at the risk of making it more opaque and certainly more controversial. The region even fell into disuse in favour of the notions of place, of territory, which some considered to be more meaningful and heuristic. However, regional thinking renewed with the critical visions of radical geography, on the one hand, and with the decentralisation and devolution processes in several countries on the other hand. The socio-economic and political rise of the regions also brought the regional question back into debate, on a European and international scale, with the theory of “new-regionalism” forged from the 1990s onwards. The post-modern turn questions the interaction between territoriality and the reticularity of regional groupings, and opens outlooks to a more generic and operational approach to new-regionalism. Throughout this evolution, two characteristics stand out: the theoretical plasticity and empirical practicality of the notion of region, both as a major scale and as an essential instrument for understanding and organising territories to serve the societies that occupy them (Claval, 2016 ; Frémont et Guermond, 2016 ; Lamarre & Mukakayumba 2019 ; Purkarthofer, Humer & Mäntysalo, 2021 ; Paasi, Harrison & Jones, 2018 ; Perrin, 2022, 2022b).
- 1 Quote translation to English is provided by the author.
2From a semantic point of view, we can find a vast number of expressions or concepts to describe the region, in different fields of the human and social sciences. This indicates the ‘infinite range of possibilities’ opened up by any attempt to define or delimit the notion. However, geographer Guy Di Méo (2003) points out that geography is responsible for the scientific approach to the “region” object, which does not, however, resolve the puzzling nature of the concept. The region is ‘one of the essential concepts, but also one of the most polysemous and even vague’ in geography (ibid., p. 776). For Roger Brunet, another geographer, the region ‘is an empty word that contains only what we put into it’ (quoted by Bourdeau-Lepage & Huriot, 2009, p. 273)1. Since its introduction into geography, the concept underwent semantic inflation to the point where it refers to a wide range of scales, from the local to the international. Yet far from being so vague, the first scientific approaches to the region developed in a context marked by rationalism and positivism.
3The region is one of the concepts, along with “environment” and “landscape”, that geographers in Europe used to establish modern geography as a scientific discipline at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It determined a founding current of geography, regional geography, which focused primarily on a sub-state scale. This current is represented in particular by the French School of Classical Geography around Paul Vidal de la Blache.
4In this approach, the region is the spatial unit that geographical work determines and characterises by collecting and cross-referencing a variety of data: soil type, climate, watercourses, coastlines and mountains, types of flora and fauna, population (type, distribution, lifestyles). Regional geography thus established geography as a scientific discipline at the crossroads of the natural sciences, sociology and history. However, regional geography was subsequently criticised for being, in particular, too idiographic, too descriptive and for adopting a fairly descriptive approach to “natural regions”. At the same time, a more pragmatic and applied vision of the region began to emerge in the interwar context of major planning projects in Europe and the United States.
- 2 This approach, combining spatial and economic parameters, is inspired by previous research carried (...)
- 3 https://asrdlf.org
5The approach to the region as a space for action took shape in the 1950s, with the establishment of a “regional science” that sought to establish laws for the spatial organisation of economic activities2. The development of regional science paralleled the quantitative turn in geography, with ‘New Geography’, inspired by new-rationalist visions and economic and mathematical models and methods. In 1951, a university centre for regional economics was set up in Bordeaux, and in 1954 the economist Walter Isard founded the Regional Science Association (RSA) in the United States. In France, the economist François Perroux developed his growth poles theory to explain the driving forces and dynamics of regional development, and in 1961 Perroux and Isard founded the Association de science régionale de langue française (ASRDLF), whose annual conferences are key events in geography and regional planning research3. Regional science influenced regional planning policies and helped to revitalise the regional approach in geography, for example by introducing the concept of the region as a ‘functional space’ (Juillard, 1962). In the following decade, Roger Brunet applied the new approaches and instruments of spatial analysis in geography and called for a renewal of regional geography and the study of regions (Brunet, 1979).
6However, from the 1970s onwards, regional science was confronted with more humanistic and complex geographical approaches to the regions, which were not confined to abstract and disembodied spatial economic models, but raised questions relating to employment, social exclusion, territorial representations and quality of life and the environment (Bailly, 2009). British geographer David Harvey, who himself began his career in the quantitative movement in geography, criticises regional science for its lack of consideration for social and political issues. He defended a so-called radical geography, influenced by Neo-Marxism, in the context of multiple crises in industrial regions undergoing economic transition (Harvey, 1973).
7The revival of regional science came from the ‘New Economic Geography”, which is rather a renewal of geographical economics. This theory flourished in the mid-1990s under the influence of the work of economist Paul Krugman. With the concept of agglomeration economics, Krugman postulated a certain correlation between spatial proximity and competitiveness, concerning for example lower transaction costs, logistical organisation or the exchange of information. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008. However, this work remains based on a fairly generic and disembodied vision of the region as an economic or trade space, while the region has acquired greater institutional and socio-political status in many countries, in line with more socio-political and geo-cultural visions of the ‘regional constructs’.
8From the end of the 19th century onwards, regionalist movements started to emerge. They drew largely on cultural and heritage claims in many European countries, particularly in the Germanic, Scandinavian and southern regions (Alliès, 2008). A number of works in regional geography informed these movements and, at the same time, cultural anthropology, provincialist literature and regionalist architecture developed. The “triumphant” construction of nation states in the nineteenth century did not mean the end of sub-state cultures or particularisms.
9In his work on the territorial construction of states, the political scientist Stein Rokkan elaborated a conceptual map of the states of Western Europe, most of which include so-called “particulars” or special groups (Figure 1). These groups have a specific identity and heritage, build on successive strata that the construction of the state-nation could enrich or attenuate, but without eradicating it (Rokkan & Urwin, 1982, 1983). The typology of peripheries developed by Rokkan identifies “interface peripheries”, or “problem peripheries”, caught between several state and national constructions but not always fully integrated, such as Flanders and Wallonia, Luxembourg and Lorraine, Savoy, the Aosta Valley and the county of Nice. Another category is that of “failed-centre” peripheries: territories that could have built up their own centrality, but have been confronted with stronger dynamics of integration on the part of other centres. These include Occitania and Catalonia, as well as Scotland and Bavaria.
Figure 1. Combinatory table of economic, cultural and political-administrative diversity in Western Europe.
Source: Kuhnle S., Flora P., Urwin D. (dir.) (1999), State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan, Oxford University Press, p. 220.
- 4 In his book L’Écosse, une nation sans État, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrio (...)
- 5 He founded the Institut d'Estudis Catalans and was one of the major architects of the renaissance a (...)
10This phenomenon is still up to date, along with a resurgence of state nationalism, with the difficulty of distinguishing between regionalism and nationalism, depending on whether one is looking at things from a scalar point of view or from a cultural and identity-based point of view, and also depending on who is sending the message, given the high symbolic and political weight of this theme. Many autonomist movements like in Catalonia, Scotland, Flanders or Corsica for instance, use the concept of ‘Stateless nation”, standardised in particular by the politist Jacques Leruez in 19834, to describe an identity and culture with a national dimension, but embedded in a regional sub-state territory. Some people also use the notion of ‘regional nationalisms’ to interpret these demands. In any case, the regional cultural and ideological movements initiated at the end of the 19th century gradually introduced new parameters. The region acquired a cultural and socio-political dimension as a space for identity and social representations. In Spain, for example, the Mancommunitat de Catalunya, created in 1914 on the initiative of the politician and writer Enric Prat de la Riba i Sarrà5, was the first recognition of a territorial unit for Catalonia since 1714. The Second Spanish Republic, established in 1931, extended the autonomy of certain regions, but the Spanish Civil War put an end to this first episode of regionalisation.
- 6 He developed this approach in Cities in Evolution, published in 1915.
11At the same time, the region was becoming the reference scale for spatial planning initiatives in several European countries. In Germany, the first planning experiments were carried out on a regional scale (Quéva, 2007). In the United Kingdom, from the beginning of the 20th century, the Scottish scholar Patrick Geddes considered that the appropriate scale for dealing with social and environmental issues was that of the region made up of a town and its surrounding area6. He was one of the precursors of the ecological approach to spatial planning, and his work inspired major concepts for understanding the region and regional planning, such as the city-region and the bio-region, although his thinking is so rich and varied that it is open to many interpretations. This work has inspired the development of “regional planning”, i.e. planning designed and implemented on a larger scale than that of the town or city. An recent example being the creation in England of “combined authorities” to organise and regulate some policies in certain city-regions (Perrin, 2021b).
12In France, the establishment of economic regions in 1917, known as the ‘Clémentel regions’ after the Minister of Trade at the time, illustrates the need to organise economic synergies and complementarities in an area structured around a metropolitan urban agglomeration, and larger than the smaller counties called “départements”. Even though at the time of the Libération the idea of the region was associated with reactionary and extreme right-wing regionalist movements, or with the regional prefectures of the Vichy regime, from 1946 the Commissariat général au Plan introduced a regional dimension into its operations. Regional planning paved the way for the gradual consolidation of regional authorities: regional action programmes in 1955, which became regional action districts in 1960, the boundaries of which defined the French regional map until 2016 (Perrin, 2002b). In 1972, these districts were transformed into regional public establishments, a kind of syndicate of departments, with a regional council made up of members of parliament for the region and representatives of the departments and communes, but with limited powers. In 1963, DATAR (Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale) was created, a department of the Prime Minister that was to become the armed wing of the State and the pillar of regional planning and development in France. Even though it was not (yet) institutionalised politically, the region already appears to be a significant unit and instrument of spatial planning.
13From the 1960s onwards, conceptions of the region evolved in line with movements for social liberation and the individualisation of socio-cultural representations and expressions. Neo-Marxist and relativist paradigms introduced new approaches to territorial development, which defended geography as a human, heterogeneous science whose objects were constantly changing. A number of works highlight a phenomenological analysis of places and spaces, according to which our perception of reality is the product of a mental reconstruction: publication in 1974 of La Production de l’espace by the influential philosopher Henri Lefebvre, founding of the journal Espace-Temps in 1975 by the geographers Jacques Lévy and Christian Grataloup, launch of the school of geopolitics by Yves Lacoste with the journal Hérodote, founded in 1976.
14The region is also subject to this phenomenological approach: the geographer Armand Frémont (1976) sees the region as a “lived space”, as a system of relationships between people and places, between a certain space and the perceptions that the inhabitants construct of this very space. However, mainly speaking, the humanist and phenomenological turn led a loss of interest to the region in French geography, as it is still often associated with an outdated regional geography or an overly formalistic regional science. Lise Bourdeau-Lepage and Jean-Marie Huriot (2009, p. 273) note that ‘the index of the encyclopaedia of geography by Bailly et al. (1992) refers 6 times to “region” and 13 times to “territory”’.
15In the meantime, a new regional geography emerged in the Anglo-Saxon corpus. Inspired by the radical geography already mentioned, it questions inequalities between regions in the United Kingdom and shows that class relations have effects on inequalities in development in each region (Harvey, 1973; Massey, 1984). The new regional geography thus considers the region to be the product of the social practices that construct it, give it meaning, and can reproduce or even eliminate it. This approach is embodied, for example, in the theory of the institutionalisation of regions proposed by the geographer Anssi Passi (1986). The new regional geography envisions the region in relation to wider political, economic and cultural phenomena, and in relation to the structure of power relationships at a given time. In German geography, too, there has been a shift towards a more social approach to the region, whereby ‘the nature of the region lies not in its characteristics as such, but in those attributed to it by an individual or a social group’ (Quéva, 2007, p. 54). This vision of the region as a social construct goes hand in hand with the strengthening of political autonomy and the institutionalisation of the regions in many countries.
16In terms of activism and politics, the more relativistic and cultural approach to the regions finds an echo in the visions and demands of several regionalist movements which, from the 1960s onwards, acted to varying degrees in Western Europe, for example in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, Brittany, Flanders and Wallonia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Corsica and certain parts of Italy. The defence of cultural rights, the context of decolonisation which emphasises the right of peoples to self-determination and the link between economic and social development, are all arguments that support the reconfiguration of political regionalism. Neo-Marxist analyses of inequalities in development and relations of capitalist domination underline the ineffectiveness of state mechanisms to resolve the economic crises that are emerging in many regions of Western Europe: the Midlands, Central Scotland and Wales in the United Kingdom, Wallonia in Belgium, and the north and east of France. Occitan intellectual Robert Lafont put forward the notion of ‘internal colonialism’ in 1967, echoing the article ‘Les colonisés de l’intérieur’ (‘The colonised from within’) published by Serge Mallet, a former Resistance fighter and left-wing political activist, during the 1962 miners’ strike in Decazeveille. In May 1968, Basque, Breton, Corsican and Occitan flags appeared in the courtyard of the Sorbonne.
17The point here is not to categorise regionalist activist movements, which are based on a wide variety of ideological orientations and trends that have varied over time. Some sub-state demands for independence have led to armed violence: Northern Ireland, Corsica and the Basque Country, for example. Political regionalism is a variable geometry object that can open to all sorts of interpretations and instrumentalisations. The essentialization of a regional identity and territory - if not of a regional ethnic group - can even lead to intellectual impostures such as the socio-territorial concept of the ‘Padania region’, invented in reference to the Po river plain to designate the regions of northern Italy. The concept was recuperated in the 1990s by the Northern League political party to defend its partisan agenda (Rivière, 2012). In any case, the recognition of socio-territorial pluralism within nation states and the renewal of political regionalism made it possible, from the 1970s onwards, to devolve greater autonomy to regional authorities in several Western European countries, once again based on different models and to varying degrees (Perrin & Seys, 2019).
18The region has thus become both an object and a subject of political science, documented and analysed by a considerable number of works from three main perspectives: the region as an institution, the region as a space for political mobilisation or the region as a space for governance (Pasquier, 2012). The comparative perspective allows us to consider the effects of European integration on the socio-political construction of the regions (Perrin, 2017). The region-institution is also analysed in a more quantitative way, with the development of a Regional Authority Index (RAI) (Hooghe, Marks & Schakel, 2008), which since its creation has been applied in nearly a hundred countries. In 2016 the “RAI-Rokkan” index was created to deal specifically with cultural, linguistic and peripheral issues7.
19Based on this socio-political evolution of the regions, in relation to global geo-economic developments, a theory of new-regionalism emerged in the 1990s.
20The theoretical approach of ‘new-regionalism’ interprets a regional revival on the basis of mainly economic and political factors: regions are strengthened, both as economic units and political authorities, and due to their location at the interface of local, national and global dynamics (Balme, 1996; Keating, 1997).
21The so-called “post-Fordist” transition of industrialised economies makes information and knowledge central to economic production and exchange. Several analyses consider that, in this context of ‘cognitive capitalism’ or ‘knowledge economy’, the region is the territorial unit that can best combine, on an intermediate scale, agglomeration and connection: agglomeration effects and proximity between the different agents of an economic system on the one hand, and connection to global information and distribution networks on the other. The geographer Erik Swyngedouw (1997) coined the expression ‘glocalisation’ to express this agglomeration/connection dialectic. While urban centres often concentrate the factors and functions of competitiveness, performance is built on interactions at more varied regional scales (Scott, 2001). The strategist Kenichi Ohmae (1995) goes further and postulates that nation-states are obsolete and unsuited to the “region-states” that are emerging from market dynamics. Within the French “school of regulation” in economics, a series of works directed by Alain Lipietz and Georges Benko (1992, 2000) illustrate, over nearly a decade, this “new economic geography”. In the field, a number of cases illustrate these situations, such as the industrial districts of the Third Italy, the electronic complexes in South-East Asia, the cutting-edge industries in Silicon Valley in California or along Route 128 in Massachusetts, the automotive and mechanical industries in Baden-Württemberg, the Fashion District of Los Angeles, and the clusters of digital companies in the Tel Aviv or Bangalore regions.
22In addition, the theory of ‘new-regionalism’ links these economic assumptions with the growing political capacity of regional authorities in several European countries. This capacity is seen as a key factor to organise the regional economic system, and to generate comparative advantages: the quality of infrastructures, and the ability of socio-economic and political players to create alliances in the interests of regional development. This echoes the importance of the ‘regional cultures’ in institutionalist economic approaches, in which “cultures” refer to the behaviour of the regional actors, who determine the governance and social interactions of each regional entity (Keating, Loughlin & Deschouwer, 2003). A decisive variable for the theory of new-regionalism is the external action of regions, their ability to develop cooperation, to join international collective action networks and to implement “paradiplomacy” (Massart-Piérard, 2005). The supposedly virtuous alliance between the cooperative capacity of players as a condition for the success of the regional economy, the necessary connection of regions to international networks and the quest for international competitiveness, gives rise to the expression ‘coopetition’, which originally came from the world of management. In this respect, the European construction provides numerous opportunities for the establishment of interregional networks and organisations.
23There is also work on a so-called ‘macro’ regionalism, which relates to international relations and concerns the formation of inter-state regional organisations such as the European Union, NAFTA and Mercosur (Mareï & Richard, 2020). The notion of new-regionalism at this level refers to changes in the governance of these organisations, which, as in the case of ‘micro’ new-regionalism, are linked to changes in neo-liberal globalisation from the 1990s onwards (Söderbaum & Shaw, 2003). This double dimension, macro and micro, of new-regionalism is all the more interesting to consider in the case of the European Union, a ‘large’ region whose development interacts with that of the ‘small’ regions within its Member States. New-regionalism also indicates that, in front of traditional state actors, both sub-state regions and inter-state regions take a new place in an international system described as post-Westphalian and neo-medievalist, where sovereignty is shared between different actors and territorial boundaries are reconfigured by the flows of the globalised economy (Duran, 2019).
24However, not all regions have the same capacity - institutional, socio-economic or even cultural - to participate competitively in international flows. The hypotheses of new-regionalism can only be verified in a limited number of ‘totemic’ cases, which are certainly representative of salient developments in the regional phenomenon, but remain the product of specific conjunctions that are difficult to generalise. Even among these different cases, it is not possible, unless we fall into a speculative register, to apply a unified reading of realities that are very different, between institutional regions with a high degree of autonomy, such as Catalonia, Baden-Württemberg, Flanders or even Singapore, or less institutionally stabilised areas such as the Third Italy or Silicon Valley. The emphasis placed on competitiveness and differentiation can strengthen regional cohesion and support attractiveness. But it can also lead to the rejection of national redistribution mechanisms, hence fostering socio-territorial fragmentation (Rivière, 2012). Contributions from radical geography show that new-regionalism has tended to underestimate the role of the state and overemphasise competitiveness as the driving force behind development.
25The urban geographer Neil Brenner (2004) coined the concept of “State rescaling” to explain how, even when it is ‘overwhelmed’ from below and above, the State remains firmly in the game by recomposing the territorial spectrum of its actions, either towards ‘small’ sub-state regions or towards ‘large’ inter-state regions such as the European Union. Numerous forces are at work, at different levels, and regional action stems from their interaction. For example, the prospect of a ‘Europe of the regions’, which new-regionalism contributed to promote, revealed to be inoperative in front of the remaining dominance of the States in territorial organisation and in European decision-making procedures. Meanwhile, the European construction benefited the institutional and socio-economic development of cities just as much as regions, if not more (Le Galès, 2011). The persistent role of the State and the importance of urban and metropolitan areas in planning policies thus mitigated the ‘centrality’ of political regions, which new-regionalism sometimes defended in a normative way. Some analyses of regional performance can rejoin some pleas for greater regional autonomy, without substantially and objectively grounding such positions. At the same time, for almost two decades now, the analysis of regions has been part of the debates on spatial and territorial post-modernity.
26From the late 1990s onwards, the new regional geography, which had contributed to an understanding of the region as a social construct, moved towards a so-called relational approach to regions and regionalisation (Quéva, 2007, pp. 54-55). In the age of widespread information and the network society, the region is seen as an open, fluid space, with evolving and porous boundaries, made up of interlocking networks of players. This post-modern, or even post-structuralist conception of influence, to use Jonathan Metzger and Anssi Paasi’s (2017) term, incorporates contributions on the multiplication of actors and the permanent recomposition of the scales of regional action (Brenner, 2004). It adds new parameters to deconstruct the very process of making a region, in the light of the dynamics of transnationalisation of socio-economic and cultural flows, both tangible and intangible. The concept of the regional boundary or frontier is seen as inoperative, as it is constantly being renegotiated and reformed. One of the phenomena used to corroborate this approach is the continuous and multiform expansion of urban agglomerations, which are spreading out on vast, sometimes transnational, scales, forming veritable metropolitan regions, emblematic of a spatial and territorial post-modernity. Numerous concepts have been forged in an attempt to apprehend this evolution (Perrin, 2021b): Geddes’ conurbation or city-region, Indovina’s diffuse city or città diffusa, Ascher’s metapolis, Soja’s post-metropolis (Figure 2). In 1961, the geographer Jean Gottman coined the concept of the megalopolis, referring to the interactions in the conurbation extending from Boston to Baltimore-Washington. In Europe, Roger Brunet and GIP Reclus (1989) identified a ‘European megalopolis’, otherwise known as the European median backbone, or even the ‘blue banana’, running from England to northern Italy via the Rhine axis, a vision that has not been without controversy and alternative proposals (Baudelle, 2005) (Figure 3). The megalopolitan scale has been reinterpreted with the notion of megaregion, as a complex set of interdependent metropolitan regions that is more than the sum of its parts (Florida, Gulden & Mellander, 2008) (Figure 4).
Figure 2. From metropolises to metropolitan regions: forms and concepts.
Source : own elaboration.
Figure 3. Blue banana and alternative vision.
Source : Baudelle, 2005.
Figure 4. Europe’s mega-regions.
Source : ©2008 Richard Florida, carte par Tim Gulden et Ryan Morris, site Who’s your city ? ; http://www.creativeclass.com/_v3/whos_your_city/maps
27The relational approach has fuelled a whole debate as opposed to so called territorial conceptions. The latter incorporate the dynamics of reterritorialisation, a ‘return to (and from) the territory’ and the persistence of local attachment and anchoring in the face of global networks, at socio-economic, political and cultural levels (Paasi, Harrison & Jones, 2018, pp. 6-9). Taken to its extreme, the relational approach leads to dead locks because it can systematically call into question the slightest degree of commodification of the region as soon as we conceive any limits or boundaries to a regional unit. This, in turn, calls into question the very relevance of a regional reflection that aims at informing political action. In empirical terms, all citizens do not have an equal access to the possibilities of connectivity and mobility, although multiplied. The effect of deterritorialisation or generalised connection needs to be mitigated according to spatial and territorial contexts, unless we introduce an urban or metropolitan bias into the analysis of what can be a region or what a region can be. Not all regions are global metropolises within an interconnected global archipelago.
28In the face of such deadlocks, the territorial complexity approach, developed in France in particular, makes it possible to combine territorial and reticular logics. According to this approach, complex territorial arrangements are formed at the intersection of ‘territorial production resulting from the mutation of principles and forms’ and ‘the remaining of territorial artefacts based on the principles of territorial modernity’ (Giraut, 2013, p. 296). The geographer Hervé Théry (2008) also believes that territories and networks are not mutually exclusive. It seems more fruitful to consider simultaneously the phenomena of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation when analysing the development of a given territorial or regional entity.
29Following the evolution of regional epistemology, several conceptual tools developed to consider the planning and development of these new complex regional ensembles, which are both territorial and relational.
30The operationalisation of complex regions gave rise to a ‘new’ meaning of new-regionalism: a planning new-regionalism, more generic in scope than the institutionalist new-regionalism that we addressed earlier (Figure 5).
Figure 5. New-regionalism: a double-entry concept.
Source: own élaboration.
31Beyond questions of economic organisation or political capacity, this new-regionalism refers to planning regions created for specific operations, on new perimeters distinct from institutionalised administrative delineations, but adapted to specific issues. This approach centred on planning corresponds to the usual meaning of “regional planning” in English (Seltzer & Carbonell, 2011, Harrison, Galland & Tewdwr-Jones, 2021; Purkarthofer, Humer & Mäntysalo, 2021). In Germany too, the term ‘region’ refers more to a planning unit than to a socio-political unit of representation. A distinction is made between, on the one hand, the division of the federal territory into a hundred or so planning regions [Raumordnungsregionen] and, on the other, the flexible and informal ‘new-regions’ that can be set up by each Land as part of its so-called ‘regional development’ policy [Regionalentwicklung], according to projects or programmes that may vary: associations of municipalities, regional associations [Regionalverbände], networks of towns, regional conferences, etc. (Quéva, 2007). The generic approach of new-regionalism allows this concept to evolve from a temporally marked vision to a more heuristic use for planning theory and practice.
32The importance of this new-regionalism in planning - that is, the ongoing creation of new planning regions adapted to changing socio-political and socio-economic parameters - is illustrated by the proliferation of notions or concepts formed to designate such ‘new-regions’, also referred to as non-conventional, or non-standard, regions. There have been as many as 150 notions, coined according to a wide variety of criteria (Paasi, Harrison & Jones, 2018, pp. 14-15). In Germany, for example, we could observe an ‘inflation’ in the establishment of new planning regions, with ‘around 400 cases of [new-regional] cooperation, whereas [institutionalised] planning regions account for only 97 entities in Germany’ (Quéva, 2007, p. 57). This shows both the limits of fixed divisions and the need to adapt planning mechanisms.
33The concept of soft-space reflects the plasticity of the (new-)planning region (Allmendinger et al., 2015). It refers to a flexible and potentially evolving delimitation of planning regions, depending on the objectives pursued and the partners involved. The soft-spaces approach can be applied to a wide range of planning and development schemes, for example: Sillon lorrain or Sillon alpin, metropolitan poles and territorial and rural balance poles in France; Merseybelt, Thames Gateway or Gatwick Diamond in the UK; ‘regional development’ regions [Regionalentwicklung] in Germany; planning areas within the Dutch Randstad; Euroregió de l’Arc Mediterrani (Euram) in the Spanish Mediterranean corridor, action territories in Switzerland, to name but a few examples. The European Union produces soft spaces through its programmes, which have facilitated the emergence of euroregions or macro-regions whose boundaries and spheres of action are not stabilised in relation to institutionalised territorial groupings (Perrin, 2021). The notion of ‘multisituated territory’ also makes it possible to account for these complex territorial assemblages, based on cooperation and networking ‘between institutional territories (neighbouring or not) or parts of institutional territories (neighbouring or not)’ (Giraut, 2013, p. 301).
34Beyond the plasticity of scales, these concepts raise questions about the procedures used to manage such “flexible ensembles”. The ability of stakeholders to adjust their interests and to engage in collaborative processes is a key variable in the operationality of such systems. Regional planning and development provide empirical examples of multi-level territorial governance systems (Leloup, Moyart & Pecqueur, 2005). As part of approaches to territorial complexity, the concept of interterritoriality, coined by the geographer Martin Vanier (2008), has made it possible to apply the issues of multi-level and multi-actor governance to territorial groupings. Most societies and people interweave different living territories: between where we work, where we inhabit, where we go for recreational or health services, etc. This situation calls for a reconfiguration of planning mechanisms, based on the coordination and articulation between authorities and institutions of these territories, in an attempt to reconcile territories (of action) and networks (of life). This concept is particularly relevant to address the situation in France of so-called ‘horizontal’ decentralisation, in which the hierarchy remains weak within a 3-tier territorial authorities’ system, whereas many of the authorities have relatively limited budgets and unspecialised prerogatives. While the State and its external services (prefectures, rectorates and academic inspectorates, regional and departmental directorates) remain significant transversal players in public policy. But this concept operates in many other contexts, such as the cross-border regions of the European Union, which bring together territories and levels of governance from different national systems (Perrin, Peyrony & Sielker, 2022).
35The evolution of the notion of the region, and of the concepts that enable us to think about the “regional fabrication”, highlight two major challenges for regional planning today: complexity and cooperation. Regional planning is a complex process involving a number of levels of governance and a variety of players, all of whom are involved in intersecting perimeters or mechanisms: schemes or plans at different levels (metropolitan, local, provincial, county, regional) or on different themes (transport, housing, environment, economy, etc.). This observation applies even more so to regional groupings, given the very plasticity of this scale. This complexity calls for cooperative or contractual procedures to bring together the interests and resources from the various stakeholders. Thus, in place of the dynamic of coopetition mentioned in relation to the institutionalist new-regionalism, nowadays we are in a situation of ‘cooplexity’ of the new regional planning (Figure 6). This expression refers to the combination of complexity (of territorial and governance settings) and cooperation (between stakeholders) that characterises the operation of contemporary regional groupings.
Figure 6. Regional cooplexity: an attempt at representation.
Source : own elaboration.
36This issue of Belgeo addresses this regional ‘cooplexity’, looking not only at changes in existing regions, but also at the forms and processes of regionalisation that are emerging at different scales, more or less informal or formalised, and in different territorial contexts... or even maritime contexts, as in the article by Matto Nicolini who opens the issue with the case of the regional cooperation in the Channel. The cross-border region around the English Channel has been an area of connection and cooperation between coastal territories in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Brexit has reshuffled the cards in terms of cross-Channel regional dynamics. We observe emerging cooperation regions which, without prejudging at this stage the extent to which they will be operational, reveal a ‘collective consciousness of the Channel’ in evolution. Still in the maritime context, Gemma Aubarell Solduga presents the research she realised on the Mediterranean macro-region for a project with the School of Public Administration of Catalonia. Between multi-level governance, soft space and players’ networks, she questions how to set to music the cooplexity of a region marked by significant fractures, but also bearing remarkable assets and numerous territorial cooperation initiatives. Frédérique Loew-Turbout presents another complex maritime space, the Caribbean region, and outlines the possible prospects for structuring this region and strengthening its development through cooperation, prospects that are as stimulating as challenging. The next two articles deal with the regions formed by urban agglomerations. Andrea Visioli analyses the evolution of residential geographies in the ‘Milan regional assemblage’. Regina Tunes shows us the parameters of the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo mega-region, Brazil’s economic command centre.
37Although they deal with a variety of regional forms, these different contributions have in common their emphasis on the critical function of regional planning as a pragmatic and constructive response to adjust, stabilise and rationalise territorial policies. Furthermore, the analyses of evolving regional forms show that one of the major challenges for planning is to operationalise complex, even ‘hyper-complex’ systems (Friedmann, 2019). This situation implies a renewed approach that we propose to describe as ‘post-complex’ (Perrin, 2022). This approach to planning aims to reintroduce legibility and coherence after the post-modernist and deconstructionist conceptual insights. It draws on interdisciplinary researches such as the works by the neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz on ‘simplexity’ (Berthoz, 2009), or the notion of ‘non-simplifying simplifications’ by the sociologist Ien Ang (2011). The post-complex approach also echoes the need for regional geography to be ‘consolidated’ by overcoming disciplinary and conceptual fragmentation (Paasi and Metzgern, 2017; Paasi, Harrison and Jones 2018) (Figure 7).
Figure 7. Post-complexity: theoretical foundations, practical perspectives.
Source: own elaboration.
38The post-complex approach aims to reconcile complexity and pragmatism, to move forward and ‘operationalise the complex’, to make decisions and planning mechanisms not only more accessible and readable, but also more coherent and effective. A first step in this post-complex agenda might be to decipher the ‘cooplexity’ referred to earlier, i.e. the functioning and dynamics of a given regional assemblage, by identifying the three main key parameters of a planning system: decision-making actors - including civil and non-institutional actors, statutory and regulatory documentation, and multi-level contractual and cooperative arrangements. The next step is to define the intersections between these different parameters, the interactions, synergies or overlaps, which then make it possible to clarify and select common objectives and determine how to achieve them (Figure 8).
Figure 8. The post-complex approach to planning: a representation based on the French example.
Source : own elaboration.
39This post-complex approach is above all a heuristic and methodological proposal, to open up perspectives on possible developments in the theory and practice of spatial planning. In line with Belgeo’s editorial line, this issue contributes to the debate on the evolving link between geography, spatial planning and the development of societies. It also highlights the importance of territorial cooperation, at different scales, for contemporary socio-territorial development.