Territorial, scalar, networked, connected: In what sense a 'regional world'?

Whilst undoubtedly central to academic and policy-relevant spatial analysis for over a hundred years now, 'the region' has continued to be an elusive category: its various meanings and the implications therein frequently being challenged and modified through paradigmatic shifts in such spatial analysis. Today, amid what is undoubtedly a period of dramatic economic transformation, political restructuring and sociocultural change, a range of often multi-disciplinary approaches to the regional concept exist, informing us, variously, how regions can become competitive economic zones within a global economy, strategic political territories in a complex system of multi-level governance, cultural spaces forged through a politics of identity, or - in an approach that departs quite radically from conventional territorially based readings - spaces constituted out of the spatiality of flow and relational networks of connectivity. Drawing on the experience of a post-devolution UK, this paper critically assesses the respective merits of these various conceptualizations of the region, and offers some remarks about the challenges confronting contemporary regional studies.