Regional Geography

In the popular conception of geography, the discipline is concerned with the study of regions and little else. Geographers have examined regions at a variety of spatial scales and from a diversity of conceptual perspectives. Regions have long been [Page 2387]a central means by which geographers organized data and made sense of the world's natural and social landscapes. Few topics have been more central to geography's history and disciplinary identity. Regions continue to form a mainstay of elementary geography pedagogy, and many geographers specialize in the analysis of particular regions, ranging from tiny places to entire cultural realms. Regions mean different things at different times and can be defined in different ways depending on the particular issue involved. Regions are important in structuring popular geographical ...