For a ‘new new regional geography’: plastic regions and more-than-relational regionality

Abstract

This article is published as part of the Geographical Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue based on the Vega symposium: ‘Bounded spaces in question: X-raying the persistence of regions and territories, edited by Anssi Paasi. ABSTRACT This paper firstly delimits a ‘new new regional geography’ centered on whether regions can be seen as relational and networked or/and territorial and scalar concerns, and beyond this, what relationality and its various topological twists means. Debates have sought ways forward by seeing regions as assembled temporary permanencies and how regions are formed and then endure despite conditions of continual change. The paper engages specifically with Allen’s (2012) notion of a ‘more than relational geography’, which questions what kind of regional entities are being made and sustained. The paper secondly advances this via notions of ‘plastic space’ to take forward debates on a more than relational geography of regions, where regions are flexible but not totally arbitrary, constrained by contextual realities forged in and through time as the plasticity of institutional combinations. Malabou’s plasticity ontology is deployed to raise important questions on the limits to seeing the regional world through always elastic deformations and the stretching of objects and relations, which can lead to thrown-together topological vagaries.