Configuring the New Regional World': On being Caught between Territory and Networks

Harrison J. Configuring the new regional world: on being caught between territory and networks, Regional Studies. Recent years have witnessed a tremendous appeal in debating the relative decline in territorially embedded conceptions of regions vis-a-vis the privileging of relational and unbounded conceptions. Nevertheless, the most recent skirmishes have seen some scholars emphasize how it is not the privileging of one or other that is important, but recognizing how it is increasingly different combinations of these elements that seem to be emerging in today's new regional world. Here emphasis is being placed on a need to analyse how the different dimensions of socio-spatial relations (for example, territory, place, network, scale) come together in different ways, at different times, and in different contexts to secure the overall coherence of capitalist, and other, social formations. The purpose of this paper is to make visible the politics of transformation in North West England by uncovering the role and strategies of individual and collective agents, organizations and institutions in orchestrating and steering regional economic development. For it is argued that the unanswered question is not which socio-spatial relations are dominant, emerging or residual in any given spacetime, but understanding how and why they are dominant, emerging or residual. The paper suggests the answer to this and other questions is to be found at the interface between emergent spatial strategies and inherited socio-spatial configurations.