Among the revealed institutions of the former administrative regions of Bohemia and Moravia, there are various formal/homogeneous and functional regions as well as their boundaries – they all reproduce the examined regions. This case study deals with the perception of the Bohemian-Moravian boundary in the minds of 454 borderland inhabitants, surveyed with questionnaires. Investigating the institutions imprinted in perceptual regions exposes on what basis people construct regions and what (re)produces such regions. Perceptual region – revised here in light of the institutionalization of regions theory and thus comprehended as the subjective image of a region in the mind of an individual person – connects certain 'European' and 'American' regional traditions. This paper introduces a way to study the reproduction of (the identity of) a region through the concept of perceptual region. Finally, based on our findings, we provide some pointers to where and how the scope of edge studies can be extended or adjusted. We discuss whether the role of ‘geography’ or ‘institutions’ is pivotal at the edge and propose that space itself (and its characteristics such as sparsity and remoteness) can be considered as dependent on or constructed by institutional frameworks. Providing a systematic analysis on the role of ‘space’, ‘society’ and ‘institutions’ within these six schools of thought for edge studies, we than revisit the discourse on region formation within ‘new’ regional geography during the 1980s and 1990s, when geographers departed from viewing regions as unique, pre-defined and timeless ‘containers’. To make this reasoning we first distil the diverse interpretations of edge found in the existing literature into six schools of thought: the expansionist, capitalist, post-(neo-)colonialist, relativist, ruralist and developmentalist.
In this paper we argue for an extended conceptualisation for ‘edge’ as a non-predetermined, temporally and spatially dynamic construct where space is ‘dependent’, function of the institutional frameworks. Here, sparsity is seen as derivations of ‘geography’ relative location as remote and the extreme environmental characteristics of the place. In some cases, the epistemological view in relation to sparsely populated regions is deterministic. Geographic edges are distant, sparsely populated regions understood by some scholars as being fundamentally different from areas classified as rural.
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