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Cultural resources are today the object of considerable attention in regional economics. Ground for new forms of innovation these resources have given rise to numerous works aiming at understanding the emergence and organisation of culture based economic activities and at identifying the role of these activities in regional development and urban planning. The objective of this article is to explore the way in which resources, and in particular cultural resources, are incorporated into production processes on the one hand, and the consequences on the resources of doing so on the other hand. Becoming an economic resource, a cultural “object” (symbol, image, cultural heritage, traditional know-how, etc.) becomes embedded within commercial relationships. The question we address here is what are the causes and consequences of this commodification of culture for the production systems, the customers and for the local communities which put a certain number of their constitutive elements into play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the results of research to explore a range of attempts to develop new regional forms, and considers the degree to which they accord to conceptualisations of the ‘new regionalism’ and accounts of the changing territorial structure of the state. It highlights the array of new regional configurations which now extends across the territory of the European Union, discussing the influence exerted by the growth of interest in European spatial planning over the course of the 1990s and considering the degree to which readings of new regionalist rhetoric have informed both the creation and substance of a number of recently conceived regional entities. The paper concludes by considering the implications posed by the growth of these new regional configurations for attempts to interpret the rescaling of governance and the reterritorialisation of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]