Bounded spaces in the mobile world: Deconstructing ‘regional identity’

Abstract

Regional identity has become an important category in the ‘Europe of regions’, and one that is often taken as self‐evident in the relations between a group of people and a bounded region. The movement of people, capital and information across spatial boundaries that takes place in the contemporary world challenges the supposed harmonious link between regions and people on all spatial scales. This paper analyses the meanings of region and identity, and the links between them. Regions are understood as historically contingent structures whose institutionalisation is based on their territorial, symbolic and institutional shaping. Regional identity is understood as an abstraction that can be used to analyse the links between social actors and the institutionalisation process. This paper suggests that an analytical distinction between the identity of a region and the regional identity of its inhabitants, i.e. regional consciousness, is useful for problematising these links. The conceptual arguments will be illustrated with analyses of identity discourses related to Finnish regions and of the mobility of the Finns between regions.

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