Methodological exercises in regional geography: France as an example

Ideas about the transformation of regional geography have generally been developed from abstract discussions on the "true' nature of regional geography. Here we take another approach. We start the discussion of the regional geographic approach not from abstract notions of how regional geography should be practised but from an overview of how regional geography is practiced at present. This is done on the basis of a brief and selective review of some recent (till about 1990) British, French, German, Belgian, and Dutch publications. There is a broad consensus about the place of regional geography in the social sciences, the importance of theory, the centrality of regional development, and the multi-level nature of regional geography. The methodological consequences of the multi-level nature of regional geography are further investigated in Chapter 2. Here a regional geographic methodological framework is proposed. This sets the guidelines for a study of the regional development of France as a whole, and a case study of Poitou-Charentes. The next chapter studies Languedoc-Rousillon from the perspective of a Mediterranean axis development. Chapter 6 examines the usefulness of the world-system approach to regional geography by studying France's position in the world-system. -from Editor