‘Vertebrating’ the Region as Networked Space of Flows: Learning from the Spatial Grammar of Catalanist Territoriality

For decades theoretical debates about political restructuring have resorted to and coconstructed geographical concepts of territory and scale, interpreting ‘new’ and ‘Euro’ regionalisms as processes of reterritorialization and rescaling (and the politics thereof). But nested and hierarchical theories of scale have been severely critiqued, and bounded notions of territory opened to question. How then to develop a more relational understanding of the region without trading one limiting theoretical master narrative for another? Drawing inspiration from recent attempts to do just this, in this paper I ask: what can we learn about the complex and relational spatiality of the region, and thus scale and territory, through the spatial vocabularies of regionalists themselves? Using the case study of the Northwestern Mediterranean, I explore the imaginaries and stratagems of Catalan regionalism and transboundary macroregionalism, particularly in the neighboring regions of Catalunya and the Comunitat Valenciana and their proposed integration in a Euroregion called the Arc Mediterrani. While Catalanists increasingly emphasize networked economic relationships and flows, they do so within a structured, territorial, and in many ways bounded understanding of Mediterranean spatial relations. How Catalanists vertebrar territori (articulate or structurate territory, in Catalan) offers an alternative spatial grammar for thinking about how various spatialities—including network and geographical scale—are distinct yet co-implicated in the social production of regional and macroregional territory.