Region, Place, Devolution: geohistory still matters

Beel, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1146-229X and Jones, Martin (2020) Region, Place, Devolution: geohistory still matters. In: The Routledge Handbook of Place. Routledge, pp. 53-65. ISBN 9781138320499 (hardback); 9780429453267 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the relationship between place and region through the lens of the place-making politics of devolution and localism in Britain; England and Wales specifically. We revisit Paasi’s treatise on regions in geography and suggest this still provides a valuable framework for looking at contemporary place-making. With its emphasis on geohistory and becoming, Paasi’s approach provides much scope with which to unravel the political, economic and cultural process that enable individual and institutional place-based biographies to coalesce in the form of a distinctive territorial unit with the overall regionalisation of society and space. Moreover, by placing the institutionalization process, with its multiple and overlapping ‘stage-approach’, and emphasizing the critical role played by discourse and symbolic orderings of space at the centre of his treatise, Paasi still enables us to locate many of the complex forces at work in constructing the place-making regionalization of society.