Regions have been regarded as processes, artefacts and discourses, and recently as 'brands' that various stakeholders use in marketing. Discourses on institutional regions are typically promoted by media, governmental bodies and planning organizations that draw on reputed collective regional identities-the expressions of past and current social discourses and cultural practices. However, such institutional regional discourses are often incongruous to spatial imaginaries of everyday life. This article scrutinizes the meanings of spatial attachment to citizens and explores to what extent regional identities are meaningful in everyday life. To avoid biased assumptions, focus-group interviews were carried out within four Finnish provinces among the members of four social movements. The results show that provincial spaces are not actively thought-and-practiced. Spatial identities are rather structured around personal experiences that typically accumulate in several locales, since personal histories are increasingly characterized by mobility. This article also recognizes that the everyday meanings of a socially constructed region are often generationally read and combine different historical narratives.

Regions frame cultural traditions, meanings and performances but in relation to national imaginaries regions have asynchronous legacies that nourish their distinctiveness. While regions are a part of place-based, cultural vocabularies and patterns of everyday life, scholars have increasingly emphasised reflexive perceptions and challenged comprehensive and overarching regional identities. Drawing on 15 focus-group interviews with locally or universally-orientated civic organisation groups in two English counties (Cornwall and Devon) and two Finnish provinces (North Karelia and Southwest Finland), I analyse reflexive, stable and eclectic identifications with regional spaces and provide a typology for understanding archetypal and absorbed regional legacies and differently positioned ways of thinking. The results indicate that the social negotiation of identity discourses can contribute to a dialogue of inclusion, the formation of multiple identities and qualified senses of belonging. The paper highlights the importance of respecting different worldviews and life-paths in the analysis of culturally situated regional identities.

Scale is a debatable term in the humanities and social sciences. Conceptualized in human geography as spatial categories of thought, as the arenas where social processes occur, as bounded politicaleconomic frames or as unhelpful binaries privileging either the local or the global, scale intersects a significant body of geographical research. The unfolding and intermeshing of topological connections that help to share moments and experiences are important sources for the differentiation, renewal and recalibration of individual identities, but they often work as cocomponents to scalar identifications. Engaging with the recent discussion on scale and the upsurge of emotional geographies, I seek to understand how people contextualize space through situated scalar perspectives and how they realign and recognize their identities through embodied emotions. The analysis of the empirical material, that comprises 23 focus groups with locally and universally-orientated civic organizations in Finland and England, focuses on the ways people use landscapes and communities as emotional signposts in their scalar identification. I argue that scale is a situated category, whose spectrum individuals negotiate through the performance of social discourses and cultural practices. In such negotiation, people scale their identity narratives to overcome or emphasize the distinctions between 'us' and 'others'.

jONI vaINIkka vainikka, joni (2013). The role of identity for regional actors and citizens in a splintered region: The case of Päijät-Häme, Finland. Fennia 191: 1, pp. 25-39. ISSN 1798-5617. Regions are often understood as social and discursive constructs that are perpetually at the heart of the politics of spatial distinctions. although regions transform over time, they are used in collective discourses as ways of structuring space and they can become important elements for individual identity narratives and practices. The proponents of the competitiveness rhetoric increasingly utilize the ideas of social capital and trust positing that regions are knowingly responsible for their affluence and economic growth. In Finland, various institutional agents have operationalized provincial spaces as imperative policy instruments. at the same time, their meaning has remained rather ambiguous to their citizens, whose spatial identifications can be eclectic and reflexive. This article focuses on one particular region, Päijät-Häme in southern Finland to uncover why the supposed internal cohesion does not seem to manifest at the provincial level. The paper approaches regional identity from two angles. First, it scrutinizes how regional actors conceptualize the region and how they facilitate regional identity discourses, and second, it analyses how individuals construct their spatial identities and belonging and studies the meaning of the institutionalized region in this process. The empirical material consists of eleven interviews with institutional actors representing regional policy, trade, education and media and four focus group interviews with locally-or universally-orientated social movements representing the general public. In this article, I argue that historical fractures and differently aligned spatial strategies can hinder attempts to reconfigure regional identities, and by implication, development discourses. I also indicate that while the province does not necessarily provide compelling identity materials, the need to belong has not disappeared in the currents of globalization.

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