City-Region Building and Geohistorical Matters

In an article published nearly 15 years ago MacLeod and Jones (2001), carefully reviewed, situated, extended, and above all celebrated the enormous intellectual contributions of Anssi Paasi to the scholarly project of doing ‘regions in geography’. Situated within, and going beyond, the ‘new regional geography’ movement in human geography and the social sciences more broadly, they looked at Paasi’s thinking on regionalization processes, abstracted in four stages, which collectively allowed them to advance (as they claimed) a meaningful understanding of regional change. Rolling forward the research clock to the likes of the Northern Powerhouse and other devolution events across the UK, the authors of this paper maintain that Passi’s framework remains a cutting-edge theoretical framework in and through which to examine region-building processes and practices. This chapter accordingly looks at the ‘new new localism’ and suggests the need to now think about the dawn of a ‘new new regional geography’.