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War II was the best thing that happened to
Geography since the birth of Strabo’, because
it placed renewed significance on regional
geographies and regional intelligence. In the
UK, a team of geographers was assembled
by the Director of Naval Intelligence to pro-
duce a series of country-by-country Admiralty
Handbooks, ‘the largest programme of geo-
graphical writing that has ever been attempted’
(Clout and Gosme, 2003). In the USA, geo-
graphy’s central mission within the Research
and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic
Services was to provide ‘clinical’ accounts of
target regions, whose function was enhanced
by the development ofarea studiesduring
thecold war: in parallel, these regional studies
were complemented by a mathematical
‘Philosophy of Air Power’ that was connected
to the postwar development of a mathematical–
statisticalmacrogeographythat heralded ‘a
new regional conception for geography’ that
was ‘given purpose as part of a broader land-
scape ofmilitarismand war’ (Barnes and
Farish, 2006; see also Chow, 2006).
But the marriage between the regional-
descriptive and the mathematical–statistical
was a shotgun affair, and travel writing and
regional geography had little in common with
spatial science. In the first place, they both
placed a premium onfieldworkas the experi-
ential ground for evocative prose, so much so
that Hart (1982) hailed regional geography as
‘the highest form of the geographer’s art’. How
many regional monographs ever reached
those commanding heights remains an open
question, but Lewis (1985) observed that even
if few academic geographers were trained as
painters or poets, there was no reason to boast
about it. Spatial science found its own aes-
thetic in the elegance of formal analytical
methods and models, and represented regions
as little more than convenient ordering devices
within an overwhelmingly abstract space. In
the second place, travel writing and traditional
regional geography sought to convey descrip-
tions of both cultural and physical landscapes.
Vidal de la Blache had assumed an intimacy
between culture, landscape and region –
between paysan,paysage andpays in rural
France – that placed great demands on the
sensibilities of the geographer. In contrast,
spatial science was largely preoccupied with
functional regionsor regional systems in which
the central organizing principle was to be
found within a society largely severed from
its physical landscape (seenodal region).
After the Second World War, for example,
Dickinson (1947) proposed a focus on the cityregion as ‘an area of interrelated activities,
kindred interests and common organizations,
brought into being through the medium of the
routes which bind it to urban centres’, and ten
years later Philbrick (1957) argued that ‘the
functional organization of human occupance
in area’ should be analysed ‘independent of
the natural environment’ (emphasis added)
through a series of intrinsically geometric con-
cepts: focality, localization, interconnection
and discontinuity. These proposals formed a
springboard for the subsequent leap towards
the formal spatial analysis of regions as ‘open
systems’ (Haggett, 1965, pp. 18–19).
Running in the depths of these different
literatures and transgressing the boundaries
they drew around regions was a sub-text that
threatened to interrupt and prise open their
compartments and closures. The journeys of
explorers and traveller-writers, the capillary
circulations that coursed through regions and
the thematization of regions as open systems
all spoke to theporosityof regional formations
(the networks of connection between places;
cf.contrapuntal geographies;power geom-
etry) and to thepoeticsof regional description
(the conventional, ‘constructed’ nature of
boundary delimitation). These twin issues have
since received explicit and substantial critical
attention.
Even at its height, regional geography was
criticized for its closures. Vidal de la Blache’s
celebratedTableau de la ge ́ographie de la France
(1903) was a portrait – some said a landscape
painting – of the individual regions of pre-
revolutionary France, produced through a
method that critics said had little purchase
on the post-revolutionary world. ‘The region
is an eighteenth-century concept’, Kimble
(1951) declared, whereas in the modern world
‘it is the links in landscapes ... rather than the
breaks’ that matter. Similarly, Wrigley (1965)
argued that the intimacy of the bonds between
‘culture’ and ‘nature’ celebrated by regional
geography was ‘admirably suited to the histor-
ical geography of Europe before theindustrial
revolution’,but ‘withthe final disappearance
of the old, local, rural, largely self-sufficient
way of life the centrality of regional work to
geography has been permanently affected.’
These twin objections were marked both
by their European origins and a superficial
understanding ofindustrializationand the
dynamics of the capitalist space-economy
(which produces regional differentiations rather
than erasing them: see Langton, 1984; Storper
and Walker, 1989). In fact, Vidal’s later account
ofFrance de l’est(1917) was an attempt to wireGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 634 2.4.2009 9:12pmREGIONAL GEOGRAPHY