Towards a Model of the Region as an Open System

Abstract

Since the dawn of classical geography, but particularly since the ‘age of discoveries’ in the fifteenth century, geography has fulfilled the primary, basic task of scientific procedure: gathering of data, recording them and classifying them. Geography needed to document and describe new territories as they were discovered, in the way botanists and zoologists in a parallel situation were occupied with systematic description of plants and animals. During the nineteenth century regional geographical thought was crystalized by Ritter [p. 34] into a certain way of thinking which became the model of regional reasoning and lasted, after being further formalized by Hettner [p. 37] until the beginning of the twentieth century.

The problems are solved not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.

L. Wittgestein