When studying a location, potential patterns, human customs, environmental landforms, or any other geographical topic, it is extremely useful to establish regions, or a similar form of categorization of the area. Regionalization, and categorization in general, universally characterizes human thought. However, it is also important to recognize that all regions are products of the human mind, and they differ in who creates them, why they are created, and how they function.
Because regions are human creations, there are multiple ways to define and categorize them. Some researchers have sorted the types of regions into three different categories, while others have defined four or more categories, or use subcategories.
The three primarily used categories are formal/instituted, functional/denoted, and perceived/vernacular/cognitive. Each of these regions can be homogenous or nodal. Sometimes a formal region can be divided into administrative and thematic regions, thus creating four region types. Perhaps four region types are unnecessary – maybe fewer will do, and one could argue that all regions in geography are actually variants of just one of the four types.
Regional Consciousness
Geographic regions are usually (but not always) defined not only spatially but according to what is there, the “content” or “theme” of the region where the contents are human and natural entities or processes. Traditionally, geographers focused their attention on the physical aspects of a region that affected and shaped the people and their institutions, but today geographers place more emphasis on the human side because the physical environment is largely mediated through culture, economic, and technology.
Part of this emphasis on the human side is the acknowledgement of a regional consciousness and identity that reflects groupings of people, ideologies, politics, and other human manifestations. Regional consciousness is a dynamic product of the region’s physical geography, its historical events, and economic situation.
The concept of a sense of place recognizes that people living in a region have undergone a collective experience that leads to shared aspirations, concerns, goals, and values, and over time such experiences develop into a social cohesiveness among those people living within a spatial unit. This sense of place translates into regional consciousness and identity that geographers and researchers can use to categorize a location.
Example of Regional Identity
An example of regions arising from regional identity can be found in Mexico. The regions of Mexico are delineated largely in terms of climate and topography, such as the Humid Gulf Coast Lowlands. However, there are many culturally influenced areas as well. For instance, throughout central and southern Mexico cultural differences among rural folk today have pre-European origins, such as the people of Veracruz (called jarochos) who owe a distinctive dress, diet and tradition to Totonac forebearers.
Mexico has three major regions: the Independent North, Central Mexico, and the Southern Poverty Belt. However, it is difficult to assign one location in Mexico or elsewhere as having a single regional consciousness because of the complexity of humans.
Geographers who study the central landscape have come to recognize that the concept of regional identity previously defined can be problematic because there is often no central, unifying cultural “belief,” no single “identity” in any given place, but a multiplicity of belief systems and group allegiances. Therefore, the boundaries and definitions of regions are not exact or concrete; they are dynamic and reflect the goals, biases, and perspectives of the geographer who created the regions.
1. Formal Region
The first main category of regions is a formal region, although it is sometimes referred to as an instituted region. Instituted regions are created by authorities within some organization, and once instituted, these regions are recognized as existing entities and have boundaries that are clearly demarcated. Similarly, a formal region usually has an institutional or political identity and distinct boundaries.
Examples of a formal/instituted region include traditional local and national government boundaries, religious organizations like the Roman Catholic Church. However, a formal region can also sometimes include generally shared attributes among people. For instance, a formal region can have a common human characteristic such as language, religion, or level of economic development or a common physical attribute such as climate, landform, or vegetation. Examples of this kind of formal region can include the area of Dixie, which is composed of US states that seceded from the Union, or the Dairy Belt, which shares common agriculture.
A further differentiation of formal regions is its subdivision into two categories: administrative and thematic. Administrative regions are formed by legal or political action, by decree or negotiation, such as property ownership, census tracts, and country borders. The definition of administrative regions aligns with the traditional classification of formal regions. Thematic regions are formed by the measurement and mapping of one or observable content variables or themes. A thematic region example is the location of pine trees, rainfall, or certain crops.
2. Functional Region
The second main type of region is a functional or denoted region. Functional regions are formed by patterns of interaction among separate locations on the earth and are fundamentally the movement of matter or energy from place to place. This can include the migration of people, the flow of water, the distribution of seeds, or the effects of natural geologic activity like volcanoes or earthquakes.
Another example of a functional region is a metropolitan area, or a megalopolis, which contains a main downtown area as well as outlying suburban and industrial sectors. Although city and suburban residents sometimes view themselves as separate, they are, in fact, inexorable intertwined by a complicated web of economic, social, and political interactions into one functional region.
The example of a metropolitan area also highlights the nodal disbursement that function regions can exhibit. Functional regions are held together by a common set of linkages or spatial interactions, and these linkages are organized around one or several nodes. Nodal regions are not uniform but are grouped together because of other connections among people in that area. Nodal regions have places included in them that are defined as similar not because they are homogenous with respect to certain selected criteria but rather because they are all tied to the same central place by the movement of people, ideas, and things.
An example of a nodal functional region is Mexico City, Mexico. The Spaniards founded Mexico City, the capital of New Spain, on the rubble of Tenochtitlan, the conquered Aztec capital, and the established highways radiated away from Mexico City to reflect the location of silver, gold, and Indian labor. During industrialism, railroad lines and newly paved roads followed the historical highway routes to and from Mexico City and its surrounding areas. The Borderland, the Tourist Fringe, and the Central Metropolitan Axis, all located around Mexico City, are identified on a functional basis.
Functional, or denoted, regions can also be used to simplify academic research of an area. Denoted regions can be created by scholars in order to reduce the complexity of the real world so that it can be better understood.
3. Perceived Region
The third main type of region is the perceived region, but it also referred to as a vernacular, naively perceived, or cognitive region. Vernacular regions are unified and distinctive areas defined by insiders who understand clearly their regional boundaries. Some researchers subcategorize vernacular regions under perceived regions. Vernacular regions, as one type of perceptual region, are identified by local residents, not as outsiders perceive them.
Perceived regions have also been defined similarly with a focus on how residents of the region decided to classify themselves, but it also can include exterior perceptions of the region. Perceptual regions are based on people’s feelings or beliefs about areas and are subjective rather than objective in nature.
Naively perceived regions are fairly synonymous with perceptual/perceived regions except for a slight emphasis on the lack of formal boundaries around the region. Naively perceived regions are created informally and come into existence through popular recognition, from people living within the region or outside of it, and without official sanction .
A typical example of a perceptual region is the South within the US. The South can be a vernacular or perceived region depending on whether one is focusing on the perspectives of the area from insiders or outsiders. Another example of a perceptual region is the West, which usually harbors concepts like wide open spaces, cowboys, ranches, mountains, and independence.
How do we determine the classification of a region?
Although there are three primary types of regions, there are many ways to classify areas, and even the various types of regions are not distinct from each other. Perhaps the best way to think of a region is simply as a classification scheme using the characteristics that best represent the place to define it.
Regions can be any shape in order to capture the human pattern that is trying to be described. Geographic regions need not be contiguous, wholly interconnected pieces of earth area, but they usually are, just as they are usually fairly compact, and not very elongated or prorupt in shape. The compactness of geographical regions is primarily due to spatial autocorrelation, natural groupings in time and space, and utility.
Regions can also overlap and are not necessarily unique in their classification. For example, both the state of California and the country of France are examples of regions that can be classified as formal, functional, and perceived regions. There are distinguishable boundaries, but there are also cultural ideologies and interior and exterior perceptions of these locations that allow them to be classified as functional and perceived regions too.
Another example of this fuzzy classification can be found within Canada. When discussing sense of place and regions within the example of Canada, Bone (2005) divides Canada into 6 regions based on a combination of formal, functional, and perceived regions: British Columbia, Western Canada, Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and Territorial North. Some of these regions follow formal boundaries, such as the borders between British Columbia and Western Canada, or the inclusion of the entire provinces of Ontario and Quebec as regions.
However, other regions, such as Territorial North and Atlantic Canada, are delineated based on human activity, natural resources, physical features, political identity, and cultural identity. For example, the sea exerts a profound influence on all who live in Atlantic Canada, whereas the vast open expanses of the Prairie region in Western Canada exert a different powerful influence on its inhabitants. Some of these functional regions overlap with the formal region boundaries, such as Ontario being the most densely populated and having the bulk of Canada’s manufacturing industries.
A key component of a culture region is that the inhabitants are aware to some degree of a common cultural heritage and differences from other territorial groups, which is known as regional identity and is what geographers look for when studying vernacular regions. This is found in some vernacular/perceived regions that also overlap with formal boundaries, like with the Quebecois nationalism found in Quebec, or isolation of British Columbia from the rest of Canada.
Can you summarize that?
In order to effectively study the many human patterns, cultures, ideologies, religions, etc., it is extremely useful for geographers to designate regions that capture similarities in human activities, whether that is language spoken or number of people working in the logging industry in a specific area. There are three primary types of regions: formal, functional, and perceived, but the designation of regions is not limited to these three types. Indeed, even these types of regions vary in classification and definition depending on the researcher using them. Overall, each geographer will need to decide how to define and delineate regions for their area of study based on what is best suited to describing their chosen human activity and location.
Want to know more?
- Bone, R. (2005). Chapter 1: Regions of Canada in Regional Geography of Canada. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP.
- Hardwick, S.W., F.M. Shelley, and D.G. Holtgrieve. (2008). Chapter 1: Introduction in The Geography of North America, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
- Kuby, M., J. Harner, and P. Gober. (2010). Chapter 2 Layers of Tradition: Culture Regions at Different Scales in Human Geography in Action, 5th ed., John Wiley and Sons.
- Montello, D.R. (2003). Regions in geography: Process and content. Foundations of Geographic Information Science, 173-189.
- Ostergren, R.C. and M. Le Bossé. (2011). The Europeans: A Geography of People, Culture, andEnvironment, 2nd ed., Guilford Press, pp. 3-5.
- Rees, P. (2010). Chapter 9: Modernizing Mexico in Blouet, B.W. and Blouet, O.M., eds., Latin America and the Caribbean, John Wiley and Sons.
Kellie Gadeken 