Functional Regions

7 Key excerpts on "Functional Regions"

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  eBook - ePub

  Regional Geography

  Theory and Practice

  • Roger Minshull(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  apart from at their edges, description of them necessarily includes description of their formal components. Incidentally, while formal description does not necessitate any mention of wider functions, the fact that functional description does involve recognition of formal regions puts it on a higher plane and leads to the ranks which will be considered later.

  There is an increasing tendency to try to give a complete picture by covering the same ground from each point of view in recent works. In addition to the well-tried sections on general physical geography followed by the regions of the country in question we now have third sections such as Dobby’s4 chapters on the social landscapes of South East Asia; Spate’s5 section 3 of India and Pakistan which considers the economy as a whole in contrast to the regional aspects of section 4. This balancing of general and regional geography could be developed further to a balancing of formal and Functional Regions in a book to give the best single description of the country concerned using the more appropriate method in any one part of it.

  While men’s activities on the earth’s surface do not inter-relate sufficiently to make it practicable to conceive of an all-embracing functioning unit, the ramifications of some Functional Regions are far-reaching. So in addition to the characteristics already mentioned, unity in diversity and the dependence of one part on the others, we find that Functional Regions may consist of several separated areas; that they are much more difficult to isolate than formal regions; and that the functions by which a region is defined may not involve a complete description of that area.

  The functional region puts the emphasis on Man’s economic activities and in particular this will involve a study of how different areas work together to produce such end products as food, clothes, houses and luxuries. The physical environment becomes secondary, and of interest only to the extent that it explains the different types of farming to a ‘determinist’ geographer, or how different foods and raw materials may be produced to a ‘possibilist’ geographer. This method of study which arrives last at the physical features from the desire to explain Man’s activities is often urged but when actually used it is seldom satisfactory to the majority still schooled in traditional geography which deals thoroughly and exhaustively with all possible aspects of the physical world before daring to introduce Man.6

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  Geographic Thought

  A Critical Introduction

  • Tim Cresswell(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Thinking About Regions The regional concept constitutes the core of geography. This concept holds that the face of the earth can be marked off into areas of distinctive character; and that the complex patterns and associations of phenomena in particular places possess a legible meaning as an ensemble which, added to the meanings derived from a study of all the parts and processes separately, provides additional perspective and additional depth of understanding. This focus of attention on particular places for the purpose of seeking a more complete understanding of the face of the earth has been the continuous, unbroken theme of geographic study through the ages. (James 1929: 195) Two questions have motivated geographical thinking over the past 2,000 years more than any other. These are “what is the connection between the human and physical worlds?” and “how can we account for spatial difference?” The second of these questions lay at the heart of what Varenius called “special geography” with its focus on particular areas of the earth’s surface and the qualities that make these areas different and unique from the areas around them. It is this line of enquiry that lies at the heart of human geography over the first half of the twentieth century. The concept that exemplifies this pursuit is “region.” At first glance the idea of a region seems a fairly vague one. It might, for instance, be thought of as a synonym for “area.” One question that immediately arises is at what scale a region exists. As a word that is used in everyday speech it most often suggests a subdivision of something bigger. Regional art, for instance, signifies artistic practices, styles, and products that are associated with a particular bit of a nation – say the Midwest of the United States. But we would be unlikely to label a national art form regional even if a nation is part of a larger continental or global whole

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  Running the Numbers: A Practical Guide to Regional Economic and Social Analysis: 2014

  A Practical Guide to Regional Economic and Social Analysis

  • John Quinterno(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Central to this view is the notion that regions contain certain dominant cities or places (sometimes called nodes) that are tied to other, less dominant places within the area. A region therefore is a discrete spatial area containing interconnected places of differing sizes and types (e.g., town and country, farms and cities, central business districts and suburbs, residential communities and office parks). While the parts of a region may differ in terms of characteristics and functions, they share links that “can be identified through observation of flows of people, factors, goods, and communication.” 11 Commuting patterns are one manifestation of the functional relationships that exist within a region. Compare the typical commuting patterns of the residents of two counties in the Research Triangle—Orange (Chapel Hill) and Wake (Raleigh)—between 2006 and 2008 (see Map 1.3). During that period, Orange County was home to an average of 62,405 working residents, of whom 58.7 percent commuted to worksites within the county and the remaining 41.3 percent to jobs in other counties. The most common destination was neighboring Durham County (Durham), to which 59.9 percent of all commuters traveled, followed by Wake County, which was where 15.4 percent of commuters headed. During the same three-year period, Wake County was home to an average of 427,259 working residents, of whom 81.6 percent worked within the county. Of the 18.4 percent of county residents who worked elsewhere, 59.3 percent journeyed to Durham County while 7.4 percent commuted to Orange County. In both communities, the overwhelming majority of commuters traveled alone in private automobiles. 12 These commuting patterns reveal some of the functional relationships that exist among places within the Research Triangle. While Orange and Wake counties share commuting ties, those links are not as strong as those that exist between each county and Durham County, which clearly is a regional employment center

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  Cities in a World Economy

  • Saskia Sassen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  9 A New Geography of Centers and Margins Summary and Implications Four important developments that took off in the 1980s laid the foundation for the analysis of cities in the world economy presented in this book. They are captured in the four broad propositions organizing the preceding chapters. 1. The territorial dispersal of corporate economic activities, of which globalization is one form, contributes to the growth of centralized functions and operations. This entails a new logic for agglomeration and is a key condition for the renewed centrality of cities in advanced economies. Information technologies, often thought of as neutralizing geography, actually contribute to spatial concentration of central headquarters functions. These technologies are capabilities that enable the simultaneous geographic dispersal and integration of many activities. The particular conditions under which the utilities of such capabilities can be maximized have promoted centralization of the most advanced users and providers of information services in the most advanced urban economies. Parallel developments exist in cities that function as regional nodes—that is, at smaller geographic scales and lower levels of complexity than global cities. 2. Centralized control and management over a geographically dispersed array of economic operations does not come about inevitably as part of a world system. Centralized control requires the production of a vast range of highly specialized services, telecommunications infrastructures, and industrial services. Major cities are centers for the servicing and financing of international trade, investment, the international art market, and many other activities that have complex requirements. Headquarters increasingly outsource some of their critical operations to this specialized service sector. This makes global cities strategic production sites for today’s leading economic sectors

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  Regional Geography (RLE Social & Cultural Geography)

  Current Developments and Future Prospects

  • Ron Johnston, Joost Hauer, G. Hoekveld(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The emphasis upon the uniqueness of regions helped to trigger a counter-revolution which redefined geography as spatial science. In this view, geography should be directed towards the search for general laws of spatial structure or pattern, deploying the positivistic approaches of mainstream physical science. The focus of attention switched from the uniqueness of place to the generality of space, often reduced to transport costs. In so far as a concern for regions remained, it was in terms of classificatory categories which were to be found at a fairly early stage on the route from description to explanation. It rapidly became clear, however, that simply producing generalizations about spatial pattern was a very limited exercise and that explaining regularities in spatial pattern necessitated their relation to social processes. In general, however, the relations between spatial pattern and social process were conceptualized as static and cross-sectional around some assumed equilibrium state; a very partial and restrictive viewpoint. The mechanisms whereby one equilibrium state was replaced by another remained unexplored territory, for example. In this sense the dynamics of spatial change could not be analysed. There was, though, one important exception to this general tendency towards ahistoricism, originating in the diffusion studies of Hägerstrand which were addressed precisely to the issue of explaining how spatial patterns changed over time. They represent one of the very few attempts, located within a definition of geography as spatial science, which explicitly sought to theorize about spatial change; they are of particular interest here in so far as they tried to specify the social processes underlying spatial change, the links between the two, and the spatial unevenness in the resultant diffusion patterns. It is for this reason that they are considered at greater length in the next section, which seeks to identify their strengths and weaknesses in understanding the links between social change, regional change, and regional uniqueness.

  In more recent years, as part of a widespread and varied reaction against the excesses of spatial science, there has been a considerable re-evaluation of the relationships between society and space. One strand of this has been the development of a humanistic geography which, in its exploration of the meanings that places have for people, revives in a rather different way concerns that were central to regional geography. But, like the regional geography of earlier eras, it remains essentially descriptive in its approach. Another strand, which has emerged from an engagement between human geography and modern social theory, puts much greater emphasis upon explanation and upon explicating the interrelationships between the uniqueness of place and more general social processes. The key proposition of such an approach, in the present context, is that regional uniqueness reflects the interplay of broad social forces in and with the specificities of regions. This necessitates the specification of the key dimensions of a given society – principally class relations but also gender relations, relations of ethnicity, and so on, and the articulations between these – and of how they combine in particular ways in particular places to produce unique regions. At the same time, however, this relationship between regional uniqueness and social processes is reciprocal, so that the former influences the development of the latter. This type of approach therefore allows the links between social change, regional change, and regional uniqueness to be explored from a different perspective. This is attempted, tentatively and schematically, in the third section of the chapter.

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  Marketing Geography (RLE Retailing and Distribution)

  With special reference to retailing

  • Ross Davies(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Traditional and Theoretical Frameworks of Study

  Most of the conceptual work in marketing geography has focused on the relationships between business centres and their surrounding trade areas. These relationships have been considered at both a regional and urban scale of enquiry, and in terms of a full range of business activities or alternatively a particular activity such as retailing. In addition, they have been examined both from detailed field, empirical research and from the point of view of theoretical abstractions.

  More important than these differences in scale, content and methodology, however, is a fundamental distinction in the conceptual literature concerning the purpose of these studies. On the one hand, many studies have been undertaken to serve as case examples of very broad issues in urban and economic geography, such as the general interaction which takes place between town and country. On the other hand, other studies have been much more firmly rooted to actual marketing problems, dealing with the specific interaction between business firms and their customers. Sometimes, of course, the precise objectives of a study are not made clear and there is a considerable blurring between the two sets of aims.

  The essential difference between the general and specific studies may be seen in the traditional empirical literature in the following way. From the 1930s until the early 1950s there was considerable interest within geography as a whole in defining the notion of the functional region (in contradistinction to the formal region), and especially in terms of the city-region. Many case studies were undertaken using map plots of shopping movements, retail deliveries, and wholesale shipments as general indicators of the extent of city regions. Over the same period, a growing awareness for the spatial complexity of business activities led to more in-depth studies of the distributive trades for their own sake. Some of this work remained primarily descriptive of the main patterns to be observed; other work became much more distinctly applied to practical problems confronting the marketing and planning professions.

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  Economic Geography

  • William P. Anderson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There are very few markets in which the intervention of the public sector is more pervasive or has greater impacts than markets for urban land. The notion that land-use patterns come about because land goes to the highest bidder must be tempered by the understanding that the public sector has veto power over many urban land transactions. Furthermore, the public sector is an important land user in its own right. Many of the functions we associate with the CBD – a city hall, a central post office, a public plaza – are properties of the public sector. Of equal importance is the fact that most transportation infrastructure and many transportation services are in the public domain. As we have just seen, decisions regarding the construction and alignment of major transportation arteries may have profound effects on the evolution of land-use patterns.

  In most parts of the developed world, it is local governments rather than regional or national governments that have the greatest impact on urban land use. In assessing these impacts it is useful to distinguish between two different but interrelated functions of local government. The first is the role of planner and regulator and the second is the role of public service provider. It is beyond the scope of this text to provide a thorough analysis of these functions. Instead, what follows is a discussion of the most important ways in which local governments constrain the market mechanisms discussed thus far.

  At the outset, it’s important to consider an important contextual factor: political fragmentation. When geographers talk about “the city,” they refer to the functional region of intense spatial interactions that surrounds a CBD. In the monocentric model, the city extends all the way to the point at which urban land uses give way to rural land uses. This is not the same thing as the “political city” which includes only the space inside a set of political boundaries over which a single local government has authority. To avoid confusion, the broader functional definition of the city is called the metropolitan area. Sometimes the political city and the metropolitan area are coterminous. But quite often the metropolitan area is much larger than the political city, with peripheral regions under the authority of a number of additional local governments.4 Political fragmentation refers to the situation where there is a large number of separate local governments in the metropolitan area.

  The presence and extent of political fragmentation is frequently the outcome of historical circumstances. For example, the city of Boston is one of the most politically fragmented cities in the world. In the seventeenth century, the political city of Boston was limited to a small peninsula extending into Massachusetts Bay. In the countryside surrounding Boston dozens of small farming towns – each with its own church, its own government charter and its own strong identity – were established by the beginning of the American Revolution (1775). The political city of Boston expanded by landfill throughout the nineteenth century and several bordering towns were annexed, but, as urbanization spread into the periphery, most towns remained independent. The result is that today the Boston metropolitan area is made up of over 100 local governments, most with their own school systems, police and fire departments, public works and land-use planning offices.

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