Region - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Region

Region
In geography, regions are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics
(physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and the interaction
of humanity and the environment (environmental geography). Geographic regions and sub-
regions are mostly described by their imprecisely defined, and sometimes transitory
boundaries, except in human geography, where jurisdiction areas such as national borders
are defined in law.

Apart from the global continental regions, there are also hydrospheric and atmospheric
regions that cover the oceans, and discrete climates above the land and water masses of the
planet. The land and water global regions are divided into subregions geographically
bounded by large geological features that influence large-scale ecologies, such as plains and
features.

As a way of describing spatial areas, the concept of regions is important and widely used
among the many branches of geography, each of which can describe areas in regional terms.
For example, ecoregion is a term used in environmental geography, cultural region in
cultural geography, bioregion in biogeography, and so on. The field of geography that
studies regions themselves is called regional geography.

In the fields of physical geography, ecology, biogeography, zoogeography, and

environmental geography, regions tend to be based on natural features such as ecosystems
or biotopes, biomes, drainage basins, natural regions, mountain ranges, soil types. Where
human geography is concerned, the regions and subregions are described by the discipline
of ethnography.

A region has its own nature that could not be moved. The first nature is its natural
environment (landform, climate, etc.). The second nature is its physical elements complex
that were built by people in the past. The third nature is its socio-cultural context that could
not be replaced by new immigrants.

Contents
Globalization
Continental regions
Regional geography
Human geography
Historical regions
Tourism region
Natural resource regions
Religious regions
Political regions
Administrative regions
Local administrative regions

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Traditional or informal regions

Functional regions
Military regions
Media geography
See also
Notes
References
External links

Globalization
Global regions distinguishable
from space, and are therefore
clearly distinguished by the two
basic terrestrial environments,
land and water. However, they
have been generally recognised as
such much earlier by terrestrial
cartography because of their
impact on human geography.
They are divided into largest of
land regions, known as
continents, and the largest of water regions known as oceans. There are also significant
regions that do not belong to either classification, such as archipelago regions that are
littoral regions, or earthquake regions that are defined in geology.

Continental regions

Continental regions are usually based on broad experiences in human history and attempts
to reduce very large areas to more manageable regionalization for the purpose of study. As
such they are conceptual constructs, usually lacking distinct boundaries. Oceanic division
into maritime regions are used in conjunction with the relationship to the central area of the
continent, using directions of the compass.

Some continental regions are defined by the major continental feature of their identity, such
as the Amazon basin, or the Sahara, which both occupy a significant percentage of their
respective continental land area.

To a large extent, major continental regions are mental constructs created by considering an
efficient way to define large areas of the continents. For the most part, the images of the
world are derived as much from academic studies, from all types of media, or from personal
experience of global exploration. They are a matter of collective human knowledge of its own
planet and are attempts to better understand their environments.

Regional geography

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Regional geography is a branch of geography that studies regions of all sizes across the
Earth. It has a prevailing descriptive character. The main aim is to understand or define the
uniqueness or character of a particular region, which consists of natural as well as human
elements. Attention is paid also to regionalization, which covers the proper techniques of
space delimitation into regions.

Regional geography is also considered as a certain approach to study in geographical

sciences (similar to quantitative or critical geographies; for more information, see history of
geography).

Human geography
Human geography is a branch of geography that focuses on the study of patterns and
processes that shape human interaction with various discrete environments. It encompasses
human, political, cultural, social, and economic aspects among others that are often clearly
delineated. While the major focus of human geography is not the physical landscape of the
Earth (see physical geography), it is hardly possible to discuss human geography without
referring to the physical landscape on which human activities are being played out, and
environmental geography is emerging as a link between the two. Regions of human
geography can be divided into many broad categories:

Cultural geography
Demography
Development geography
Economic geography
Ethnography
Geopolitics
Health geography
Historical geography
Language geography
Religion geography
Social geography
Time geography
Tourism geography
Transportation geography
Urban geography
Media Geography

Historical regions

The field of historical geography involves the study of human history as it relates to places
and regions or the study of how places and regions have changed over time.

D. W. Meinig, a historical geographer of America, describes many historical regions in his

book The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. For
example, in identifying European "source regions" in early American colonization efforts, he
defines and describes the Northwest European Atlantic Protestant Region, which includes
sub-regions such as the "Western Channel Community", which itself is made of sub-regions

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such as the English West Country of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset.

In describing historic regions of America, Meinig writes of "The Great Fishery" off the coast
of Newfoundland and New England, an oceanic region that includes the Grand Banks. He
rejects regions traditionally used in describing American history, like New France, "West
Indies", the Middle Colonies, and the individual colonies themselves (Province of Maryland,
for example). Instead he writes of "discrete colonization areas," which may be named after
colonies but rarely adhere strictly to political boundaries. Historic regions of this type
Meinig writes about include "Greater New England" and its major sub-regions of
"Plymouth," "New Haven shores" (including parts of Long Island), "Rhode Island" (or
"Narragansett Bay"), "the Piscataqua," "Massachusetts Bay," "Connecticut Valley," and to a
lesser degree, regions in the sphere of influence of Greater New England, "Acadia" (Nova
Scotia), "Newfoundland and The Fishery/The Banks."

Other examples of historical regions include Iroquoia, Ohio Country, Illinois Country, and
Rupert's Land.

Tourism region

A tourism region is a geographical region that has been designated by a governmental

organization or tourism bureau as having common cultural or environmental
characteristics. These regions are often named after a geographical, former, or current
administrative region or may have a name created for tourism purposes. The names often
evoke certain positive qualities of the area and suggest a coherent tourism experience to
visitors. Countries, states, provinces, and other administrative regions are often carved up
into tourism regions to facilitate attracting visitors.

Some of the more famous tourism regions based on historical or current administrative
regions include Tuscany[1] in Italy and Yucatán[2] in Mexico. Famous examples of regions
created by a government or tourism bureau include the United Kingdom's Lake District[3]
and California's Wine Country.[4] great plains region

Natural resource regions

Natural resources often occur in distinct regions. Natural resource regions can be a topic of
physical geography or environmental geography, but also have a strong element of human
geography and economic geography. A coal region, for example, is a physical or
geomorphological region, but its development and exploitation can make it into an
economic and a cultural region. Some examples of natural resource regions include the
Rumaila Field, the oil field that lies along the border or Iraq and Kuwait and played a role in
the Gulf War; the Coal Region of Pennsylvania, which is a historical region as well as a
cultural, physical, and natural resource region; the South Wales Coalfield, which like
Pennsylvania's coal region is a historical, cultural, and natural region; the Kuznetsk Basin, a
similarly important coal mining region in Russia; Kryvbas, the economic and iron ore
mining region of Ukraine; and the James Bay Project, a large region of Quebec where one of
the largest hydroelectric systems in the world has been developed.

Religious regions

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Sometimes a region associated with a religion is given a name, like Christendom, a term
with medieval and renaissance connotations of Christianity as a sort of social and political
polity. The term Muslim world is sometimes used to refer to the region of the world where
Islam is dominant. These broad terms are very vague when used to describe regions.

Within some religions there are clearly defined regions. The Roman Catholic Church, the
Church of England, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and others, define ecclesiastical regions
with names such as diocese, eparchy, ecclesiastical provinces, and parish.

For example, the United States is divided into 32 Roman Catholic ecclesiastical provinces.
The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod is organized into 33 geographic districts, which are
subdivided into circuits (the Atlantic District (LCMS), for example). The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints uses regions similar to dioceses and parishes, but uses terms like
ward and stake.

Political regions

In the field of political geography, regions tend to be based on political units such as
sovereign states; subnational units such as administrative regions, provinces, states (in the
United States), counties, townships, territories, etc.; and multinational groupings, including
formally defined units such as the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations, and NATO, as well as informally defined regions such as the Third World, Western
Europe, and the Middle East.

Administrative regions

The word "region" is taken from the Latin regio (derived from regere, to rule), and a
number of countries have borrowed the term as the formal name for a type of subnational
entity (e.g., the región, used in Chile). In English, the word is also used as the conventional
translation for equivalent terms in other languages (e.g., the область (oblast), used in
Russia alongside a broader term регион).

The following countries use the term "region" (or its cognate) as the name of a type of
subnational administrative unit:

Belgium (in French, région; in German, Region; the Dutch term gewest is often
translated as "region")
Chad (région, effective from 2002)
Chile (región)
Côte d'Ivoire (région)
Denmark (effective from 2007)
England (not the United Kingdom as a whole)
Eritrea
France (région)
Ghana
Guinea (région)
Guinea-Bissau (região)
Guyana

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Hungary (régió)
Italy (regione)
Madagascar (région)
Mali (région)
Malta (reġjun)
Namibia
New Zealand
Peru (región)
Portugal (região)
Philippines (rehiyon)
Senegal (région)
Tanzania
Togo (région)
Trinidad and Tobago (Regional Corporation)

The Canadian province of Québec also uses the "administrative region" (région
administrative).

Scotland had local government regions from 1975 to 1996.

In Spain the official name of the autonomous community of Murcia is Región de Murcia.
Also, some single-province autonomous communities such as Madrid use the term región
interchangeably with comunidad autónoma.

Two län (counties) in Sweden are officially called 'regions': Skåne and Västra Götaland, and
there is currently a controversial proposal to divide the rest of Sweden into large regions,
replacing the current counties.

The government of the Philippines uses the term "region" (in Filipino, rehiyon) when it's
necessary to group provinces, the primary administrative subdivision of the country. This is
also the case in Brazil, which groups its primary administrative divisions (estados; "states")
into grandes regiões (greater regions) for statistical purposes, while Russia uses
экономические районы (economic regions) in a similar way, as does Romania and
Venezuela.

The government of Singapore makes use of the term "region" for its own administrative
purposes.

The following countries use an administrative subdivision conventionally referred to as a

region in English:

Bulgaria, which uses the област (oblast)

Russia, which uses the область (oblast'), and for some regions the край (krai)
Ukraine, which uses the область (oblast')
Slovakia (kraj)

China has five ⾃自治区 (zìzhìqū) and two 特別⾏行行政區 (or 特别⾏行行政区; tèbiéxíngzhèngqū),
which are translated as "autonomous region" and "special administrative region",
respectively.

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Local administrative regions

There are many relatively small regions based on local government agencies such as
districts, agencies, or regions. In general, they are all regions in the general sense of being
bounded spatial units. Examples include electoral districts such as Washington's 6th
congressional district and Tennessee's 1st congressional district; school districts such as
Granite School District and Los Angeles Unified School District; economic districts such as
the Reedy Creek Improvement District; metropolitan areas such as the Seattle metropolitan
area, and metropolitan districts such as the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of
Greater Chicago, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, the Metropolitan Police
Service of Greater London, as well as other local districts like the York Rural Sanitary
District, the Delaware River Port Authority, the Nassau County Soil and Water Conservation
District, and C-TRAN.

Traditional or informal regions

The traditional territorial divisions of some countries are also commonly rendered in
English as "regions". These informal divisions do not form the basis of the modern
administrative divisions of these countries, but still define and delimit local regional identity
and sense of belonging. Examples include:

Finland
Japan
Korea
Norway (landsdeler)
Romania
Slovakia

Functional regions

Functional regions are usually understood to be the areas organised by the horizontal
functional relations (flows, interactions) that are maximised within a region and minimised
across its borders so that the principles of internal cohesiveness and external separation
regarding spatial interactions are met (see, for instance, Farmer and Fotheringham, 2011[5];
Klapka, Halas, 2016[6]; Smart, 1974[7]). A functional region is not an abstract spatial
concept, but to a certain extent it can be regarded as a reflection of the spatial behaviour of
individuals in a geographic space. The functional region is conceived as a general concept
while its inner structure, inner spatial flows, and interactions need not necessarily show any
regular pattern, only selfcontainment. The concept of self-containment remains the only
crucial defining characteristic of a functional region. Nodal regions, functional urban
regions, daily urban systems, local labour-market areas (LLMAs), or travel-to-work areas
(TTWAs) are considered to be special instances of a general functional region that need to
fulfil some specific conditions regarding, for instance, the character of the region-organising
interaction or the presence of urban cores, (Halas et al., 2015[8]).

Military regions

In military usage, a region is shorthand for the name of a military formation larger than an

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Army Group and smaller than an Army Theater or simply Theater. The full name of the
military formation is Army Region. The size of an Army Region can vary widely but is
generally somewhere between about 1 million and 3 million soldiers. Two or more Army
Regions could make up an Army Theater. An Army Region is typically commanded by a full
General (US four stars), a Field Marshal, or General of the Army (US five stars), or
Generalissimo (Soviet Union), in the US Armed Forces, an Admiral may also command a
region. Due to the large size of this formation, its use is rarely employed. Some of the very
few examples of an Army Region are each of the Eastern, Western, and southern (mostly in
Italy) fronts in Europe during World War II. The military map unit symbol for this echelon
of formation (see Military organization and APP-6A) consists of six Xs.

Media geography

Media geography is a spatio-temporal understanding, brought through different gadgets of

media, nowadays, media became inevitable at different proportions and everyone supposed
to consumed at different gravity. The spatial attributes are studied with the help of media
outputs in shape of images which are contested in nature and pattern as well where politics
is inseparable. Media geography is giving spatial understanding of mediated image.

See also
Autonomous region
Committee of the Regions
Continent
Continental fragment
Euroregion
Latin names of regions
Military district
Regional district
Regionalism (disambiguation)
Regional municipality
Subcontinent
Submerged continents
Subregion
Supercontinent
United Nations geoscheme

Notes
1. Turismo.intoscana.it (http://www.turismo.intoscana.it/intoscana2/export/TurismoRTen).
Retrieved 2009-11-25
2. Visitmexico.com (http://www.visitmexico.com/wb/Visitmexico/Visi_Yucatan) Archived (htt
ps://web.archive.org/web/20100102031607/http://visitmexico.com/wb/Visitmexico/Visi_Y
ucatan) 2010-01-02 at the Wayback Machine, Retrieved 2009-11-25
3. Lakedistrict.gov.uk (http://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk), Retrieved 2009-11-25
4. Winecountry.com (http://www.winecountry.com), Retrieved 2009-11-25
5. Farmer, CJQ; Fotheringham, AS (2011). "Network-based functional regions".

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Environment and Planning A. 43 (11): 2723–2741. doi:10.1068/a44136 (https://doi.org/1

0.1068%2Fa44136).
6. Klapka, P; Halas, M (2016). "Conceptualising patterns of spatial flows: five decades of
advances in the definition and use of functional regions". Moravian Geographical
Reports. 24 (2): 2–11. doi:10.1515/mgr-2016-0006 (https://doi.org/10.1515%2Fmgr-201
6-0006).
7. Smart, MW (1974). "Labour market areas: uses and definition". Progress in Planning. 2:
239–353. doi:10.1016/0305-9006(74)90008-7 (https://doi.org/10.1016%2F0305-9006%2
874%2990008-7).
8. Halas, M; Klapka, P; Tonev, P; Bednar, M (2015). "An alternative definition and use for
the constraint function for rule-based methods of functional regionalisation".
Environment and Planning A. 47 (5): 1175–1191. doi:10.1177/0308518X15592306 (http
s://doi.org/10.1177%2F0308518X15592306).

References
Bailey, Robert G. (1996) Ecosystem Geography. New York: Springer-Verlag.
ISBN 0-387-94586-5
Meinig, D.W. (1986). The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500
Years of History, Volume 1: Atlantic America, 1492-1800. New Haven: Yale University
Press. ISBN 0-300-03548-9
Moinuddin Shekh. (2017) " Mediascape and the State: A Geographical Interpretation of
Image Politics in Uttar Pradesh, India. Netherland, Springer.
Smith-Peter, Susan (2018) Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil
Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Leiden: Brill, 2017. ISBN 9789004353497

External links
Map and descriptions of hydrologic unit regions of the United States (http://water.usgs.g
ov/GIS/regions.html)
Federal Standards for Delineation of Hydrologic Unit Boundaries (ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usd
a.gov/NCGC/products/watershed/hu-standards.pdf)
Physiographic regions of the United States (https://web.archive.org/web/200605150440
37/http://tapestry.usgs.gov/physiogr/physio.html)

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