Region Regionalization And Regional Identity

Region, regionalization and regional identity. Steps, conditions and consequences

Introduction

The regions have existed since ancient times, when the empires started to fight each other in exchange for achieving more spaces and territories. Sometimes their boundaries and dimensions were not clear, other times they were determined by natural features and had obvious boundaries.
It is eminently clear that the boundaries (national, regional, local and even continental – the case of Asia) have changed during the time. In most of the cases, at the beginning of their own evolution, the regions have used natural criteria in order to delineate them and to differentiate from each other. The main factor that shaped the regions was, without no

Hence, the region represented interest, not necessarily intensified, from the beginning of the 19th century (Paasi, 2009, p. 131), especially in the field of Geography.
Regions and regional identity have become important issues in many academic fields (history, political sciences, sociology, economy) during approximately the last 25 years (Paasi, 2009, pp. 121-122) and still have an impressive increasing today, not only sustained by the overall regional development met worldwide, but also by the development of Regional Geography as an individual science, accelerated starting from the

Transilvania, Țara Românească etc.), anthropogenic regions, climatic regions (i.e. The Mediterranean Region), soil regions, vegetation regions, hydrological regions (i.e. Jiului Valley), cultural regions, economical regions, agricultural regions, industrial regions, commercial regions, development regions (the case of the eight development regions from Romania, even if these regions are for the moment only statistical units), geopolitical regions and so on. Moreover, the dimensions of the regions can vary from one or few villages (few kilometers) to larger areas such continents or groups of countries. This brief classification certainly depends on the investigators’ interests, purposes and fields of