Political spaces and representation within the state - Applied Geography: Principles and Practice - page 386

Table 27.1 Redistricting the lower house of Washington's State
legislature.

important in the redistricting process from the
1970s on because of concerns that blacks and
other minorities were under-represented. Box
27.2 illustrates this, as yet unrealised, potential.

because of the 'messiness' of the geographical
mosaic onto which the regionalisation is to be
imposed and range of interest groups (most of
them political in the widest usage of that term),
which differ in their preferred outcomes.

CONCLUSIONS

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

The easiest problems to tackle in most situations
are those to which there is a single, right solution:
the task is to determine that solution, and then
implement it. Unfortunately, most problems in
applied geography—and certainly so in the area
discussed in this chapter—have no single right
solution. Instead, there is a multiplicity of
solutions, some at least of which will be favoured
by different interest groups. The task of people
allocated such problems is thus not solution but
resolution: they must not only identify feasible
solutions but recommend either that which is
favoured by the interest group that makes the
strongest case for its preferred outcome or that
which seems to provide most for everybody (i.e. is
the least worst outcome for all, even if not the
best for anyone).
Resolution rather than solution is clearly the
case with the application of principles of
regionalisation to the definition of political spaces
and representation within the state. There is a large
range of possible outcomes to each problem,

There is a massive literature on regions and regional
geography: the most recent general survey is
provided by Claval (1998), whereas a more critical
stance is covered in several of the essays in Johnston
et al . (1990). The classic work on territoriality as a
spatial strategy—in effect, a form of practical
regionalisation— is by Sack (1986). On the drawing
of constituency boundaries in the United
Kingdom, the standard work is Rossiter et al . (1999).

REFERENCES

Claval, P. (1998) An Introduction to Regional Geography.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Freeman, T.W. (1967) The Geographer's Craft. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Hart, J.F. (1982) The highest form of the geographer's art.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72, 1-29.
Johnston, R.J. (1968) Choice in classification: the
subjectivity of objective methods. Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 58, 575-689.