Regions and Regionalism

Regions are a means for geographers to classify, categorize, or simplify Earth's surface. A primary concern of geography is how and why one part of the Earth is different from other parts. Given the vast size and variety of environments, both natural and human, on Earth's surface, it is practical for geographers to divide the Earth into more manageable pieces. Regions are tools that allow geographers to focus their inquiries onto manageable areas. The division into manageable pieces extends from global to very local scales, since regions may be as large as continents and as small as neighborhood blocks.

Regions are based on a commonality, sameness, similarity, or homogeneity. The homogeneity may be based on characteristics of the physical environment (climate, vegetation, or landforms), on human cultural traits (religion, language, settlement, economic activity, and ethnicity), or on a synthesizing combination of both physical and human elements. The key concept is that regions share common properties that differentiate them from each other. Regions can be considered to maximize their commonality within themselves and maximize their differences among one another. To accomplish that goal, regions have [Page 2398]both relative and specific locations, areal sizes, and boundaries or borders. Borders of regions may be absolute and concrete or may be transitional or gradual. Regions can even have transitional areas between other regions.

Regions are to geographers as eras are to historians. Just as historians categorize the past into eras or periods, geography and geographers categorize Earth into regions on the basis of commonalities in cultural traits such as religion, language, and ethnicity and in physical traits such as climate. Geographers from Carl Sauer to John Fraser Hart believed that one of the principal purposes of geography is to learn about regions and why they differ from each other. According to that school of thought, regions are based on how people have lived on the land, used resources, and interacted with their environment through time. Many schools and universities offer an introductory geography course, often titled “World Regional Geography.” Such courses typically cover the entire Earth during an academic term. In world regional geography courses, the planet is usually divided into the seven major regions of Europe, North America, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, East and southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East (or West Asia), and Australia and Oceania. Additionally, those regions are often taught in separate regional geography courses. The key concept is that the areas within those regions share commonalities in terms of physical and human geography. The purpose of those courses, from global to regional, is to explain how and why regions differ from each other. For example, areas within North Africa and the Middle East are alike with respect to climate, religion, and languages, which differentiate them from other regions such as Europe or sub-Saharan Africa.

Additionally, many colleges or universities offer courses in systematic geography (often named “human geography” and “physical geography”). Human geography courses take a systematic approach in the study of worldwide patterns of language, religion, population, and other human traits and activities. Regions are also covered in these courses. For example, Europe is a region of Indo-European languages. Within this region of languages, there are subregions of Romance and Germanic Languages, and within the region of Romance Languages rest regions of Spanish, French, and Italian. Within an Italian-speaking region, there are regional dialects that can be mapped, creating more regions. Courses in physical geography make use of the concept of region in showing different regions of climate, vegetation, and landforms. With regard to climate regions, the Köppen system, which creates climate regions based on vegetation, temperature, precipitation, and seasonality of precipitation, is perhaps the best known. The Köppen system recognizes tropical, temperate, continental, polar, and dry climate regions. The goal in these systematic courses, whether human or physical, is, for example, to explain why there are different regions of language and climate.

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