Regional Development and Planning (REGUS).

This article features the Regional Udvikling og Styring (REGUS) project. The REGUS project was started in spring 1977 by four teachers at the Aalborg University Centre in Denmark--two sociologists and two economists, all part-time engaged in the project. REGUS deals with regional economic development and planning in the region of northern Jutland. The project is financed exclusively by the center. Theoretically, most studies dealing with regional development problems were either mainly economic or mainly politologically oriented. The real world was all too often interpreted and predicted in economic categories only--whether those of the political economy or those of more traditional bourgeois national economics. Variations in stage theories, unequal development theories or growth poles theories continued to dominate more or less explicitly. The same unidimensionality could be found in the politologically orientated planning and policy studies. Political structures, power structures, planning, means of regulation, etc., were all too often isolated, or just implicitly postulated as causes of development.. Now this onesidedness of course is not per se disqualifying. In certain areas and at certain levels of analysis political and especially economic factors certainly seem to be the strategic variables to be dealt with.