Perspectives on Regionalism in (Southern) Africa
This review essay uses the works of Nana Poku (2001), James Sidaway (2002) and Andrew Grant and Fredrik Soderbaum (2003) as principal texts for the discussion on regionalism in Africa. Together, the works of both authors create an elaborate text on regionalism in the continent and provide the intellectual space for re-assessing regionalisation in (southern) Africa against the backdrop of discourses of regionalism elsewhere. The essay is not intended to offer book reviews. Rather, the aim is to tease out salient points in the texts in order to bring them into a coherent discussion. The intensive re-conceptualisation of regions, place, space and scale has yielded a quite different appreciation of regions and their formation than what the areal differentiation school of thought once offered. The result has been to conceive spatial differentiation in terms of practices and processes rather than some given or preconceived qualities. Accordingly, 'it has become typical to understand regions as historically contingent social processes emerging as a constellation of institutionalised practices, power relations and discourse' (Paasi, 2004, p. 540). In this sense, spatial differentiation cannot be reduced to a single scale (Duncan and Savage, 1989). Agents of regionalism are not necessarily limited to the regional scale, but are part of a constellation of practices and a mix of actors. As Beauregard (1995, p. 239) has correctly noted, 'once we focus our attention on the agents who literally make scale, the partitioning of space into global-national-regional-local seems simplistic . . . In fact, it is the mix of those actors, and the distribution of influence among them, that results in such places becoming regional, national or international nodes in the world-system'. It can be argued that the ramification of power relations, together with changes in the nature and scales at which regions are formed, render the notion of the region unstable. Indeed, calls for new regionalisms have become a familiar feature of the debate
The New Regionalism: Key Characteristics of an Emerging Movement
Abstract This article analyzes the emergence of a “new regionalism” and situates this movement within the historical evolution of regional planning. Key characteristics include (1) a focus on specific territories and spatial planning; (2) a response to the particular problems of the postmodern metropolitan region; (3) a holistic perspective that integrates planning specialties as well as environmental, equity, and economic goals; (4) a renewed emphasis on physical planning, urban design, and sense of place; and (5) a more activist or normative stance on the part of planners. The implementation of new regionalist concepts is likely to come about not through top-down regional government, but through incremental development of social capital, institutions, ad hoc partnerships, and frameworks of incentives and mandates between existing levels of government.
Geographical Change: A Study in Marching Time or the March of Time?
Discussions of long-term geographical change have tended to stress changes in landscape produced by the sustained or unfolding operation of particular processes rather than changes in the nature of the processes themselves. This paper calls for more study of the latter, It is argued that in the very long term, human spatial order has been organised around a succession of qualitatively different systems, each reflecting changes in the scale at which society was integrated and in its ideological constructs. A succession of five different systems of spatial order are examined, each replete with its own processes and forms of integration. It is further argued that exploring how one system gave way to another provides us with a geographical contribution to the wider debate on societal evolution, one in which the spatial structuring of the processes involved appears crucial to their operation.