This paper is a response to Reece Jones' ‘Categories, borders and boundaries' (2009) that aims to give an alternate proposal to rethink geographical categories and boundary studies. First, it examines the various meanings of the word ‘category' as used in Jones' paper. We then stress the importance of the processes involved in constructing spatialized and unspatialized categories as a central issue for social sciences. Using different examples such as the city and the nation state, we finally argue that the triad of reification–naturalization–fetishization is a good tool to analyse the social construction of geographical categories and boundaries.