The Region as an Evolutive System

It may seem strange that, after four decades of existence of the Regional Science Association, the concept of the region is still a subject of discussion. Many things have changed however, some of them radically, since the first Isardian definitions. Whereas it seems increasingly unsatisfactory to make a merely generic use of the term ‘region’, synonymous with territory, it nevertheless appears impossible to single out a precise geographic entity that can be rigorously defined as such. In the context of socio-economic relations that have reached a global scale, and now that local entities (and their relation space) are considered simply as ‘nodes’ of a global network, it is even being questioned whether the region has any strategic significance at all.