Crossing borders, building identities: new regionalizations, tourism and everyday life in Northern Europe (Finnish Academy 2005-2009)

The purpose of this project is to contribute both theoretically and empirically to our understanding of regions, boundaries and identities by analysing the meanings of different boundaries (political, cultural, social, economic, administrative) in the processes of regionalization and identity building. The project will be contextualized within the ongoing interdisciplinary debates on the “Europe of regions” and the debates on the political, cultural and economic forms of regionalization and the meanings and manifestations of regional identities. We will call this process as ‘new regionalization’, since this exceeds traditional forms of local ‘bottom-up regionalism’, indeed it fuses local and regional forms of action with the governmental, economic and political processes coming ‘from above’. This project will be grounded firmly on empirical case studies that will lead to two doctoral dissertations. The first study will analyse various forms of regionalization (everyday life, administrative, economic) on both sides of the Finnish-Swedish border (the EU internal state border), the second will develop further the ideas of region building at the Finnish-Russian border (the EU external border) and compare this with a new region that is less clearly bounded and results from the administrative actions associated with the EU policies (sub-state border). All case studies will include a perspective of tourism geography in its approach, a neglected dimension in both boundary and region building studies, to analyse how material and symbolic elements (nature, culture, economy, etc.) are used in region building processes and regional development actions. The clarification of the empirical content of such categories as region, boundary and identity is an extremely important task for understanding the re-scaling of the forms of social life occurring all around the world. Our concrete case study contexts provide an excellent combination of regions to analyse these processes.