Tourism and Regional Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 143

Eurozone economic crisis. Globalisation of the media also relays images
across the world of the popular revolts in regions such as the Arab world that
started in late 2010 (Fioramonti, 2012; see Chapter 14).
Different perspectives of regions include (i) relations of production in a
given time and place; (ii) regions being defined by a local culture; and (iii) the
region as a setting for social interaction of all types (Malecki, 1997). While a
region is a geographic part of the earth's surface, it has also been defined as
a space occupied by people who feel affinities of speech, religion, history or
way of life (Tosun & Jenkins, 1996). In identifying the three main types of
regions, Smith (1995) lists (i) a priori regions; (ii) homogeneous regions; and
(iii) functional regions. An a priori region is one in which someone has
already created a boundary around it and assigned it a name, such as a politi-
cal unit. A homogeneous region is defined by an objective set of internal
similarities. This is the type of region that planners most often think of
when hearing the term region. Important issues with defining such a region
are the selection of relevant characteristics and the specification of the degree
of similarity that would cause a locale to be included in the region. Smith's
(1995) final region is the functional region, which is an area with a high
degree of internal interaction.
Malecki (1997) highlights the changing concept of a region extending
beyond national boundaries. He suggests that there have been major changes
which have occurred in response to technological changes, including indus-
trial shifts such as lower transport costs, standardisation of production and
increased minimum efficient scale of plants. These changes have resulted in
regions being not only subsets of national space but also of international
space and, therefore, part of the globalisation process. The complexity of the
region in the context of globalisation is also raised by Coe et al. (2004). They
argue that in developing a framework for understanding regional develop-
ment, one must pay attention not only to endogenous growth factors within
specific regions but also the strategic needs of trans-local actors coordinating
global production networks. Their conceptualisation of regional develop-
ment is 'a dynamic outcome of the complex interaction between territorial-
ized relational networks and global production networks within the context
of changing regional governance structures' (Coe et al. , 2004: 469).
Acharya (2012: 22) traces the changing nature of regions in the literature
on international relations. Regions were traditionally viewed as focused on
'relatively fixed variables including geographic proximity, shared cultural and
linguistic features and common heritage' (Acharya, 2012: 22). Studies in the
1960s from a behavioural perspective focused on discovering what regions
were based on quantitative methods and, in particular, Acharya (2012) refers
to a study by Thompson (1973) who found three clusters of attributes of
regional subsystems. The three clusters are (i) general geographic proxim-
ity; (ii) regularity and intensity of interactions; and (iii) shared perceptions
of the regional subsystem as a distinct theatre of operations. More recent