City-Region Building and geohistorical matters: New new localism and the New new regionalism

Abstract

In an article published nearly 15 years ago with Gordon MacLeod, we carefully reviewed, situated, extended, and above all celebrated the enormous intellectual contributions of Anssi Paasi to the scholarly project of doing ‘regions in geography’ Situated within, and going beyond, the ‘new regional geography’ movement in human geography and the social sciences more broadly, we looked at Paasi’s thinking on regionalization processes, abstracted in four stages, which collectively allowed us to advance (we claimed) a meaningful understanding of regional change. Rolling forward the research clock, I maintain that Paasi’s framework remains a cutting-edge theoretical framework in and through which to examine region-building processes and practices. This article accordingly looks at the ‘new new localism’ and suggests the need to now think about the dawn of a ‘new new regional geography’.